Events
Current and Upcoming Events
Winter Term 2025-26
Past Events
Summer Term 2025
We rounded off the term with this year’s Midsummer Readings, organised by Sarah Beyvers, Paul Hamann-Rose and members of the Fachschaft. A burst of unseaonal rain sent us indoors, but didn’t dampen the atmosphere in the slightest. Students and staff read favourite pieces of literature, the Hammerchor sang beautifully, and for the first time ever, we had the joy of celebrating the talent of the brilliant student participants in our newly set up Creative Writing Workshop, who read some of their own works to warm applause all around.
In July, Dale Townshend (Manchester Metropolitan University) joint the chair for a stint as visiting professor. Durin his time in Passau, Dale gave a brilliant guest lecture - “What Ann Radcliffe Saw: The Great Enchantress on Tour, 1797–1802” – drawing on his research for the new CUP edition of Radcliffe’s posthumous works. Dale also held a workshop for early career researchers on preparing and pitching a first book for publication.
Luisa Calè (Birkbeck), Vicky Mills (Birkbeck) and Katharina Boehm jointly organized the third in a series of conferences exploring new approaches to the history of the book. This year’s conference was entitled Paper Ecologies: Histories, Materialities, Experiments and explored and explored the intertwined materialities of paper and the page across time, from the medieval period to the digital present. Papers and discussions revolved around questions such as the following: How can we reinsert page and paper into the systems of labour, resources, and networks they sustain and reflect? How have changes and innovations in paper production influenced how the page is conceptualized and used? And what can we learn from the life cycle of paper and pages and their journeys through different hands and contexts – as the material ground on which writers and artists work; annotated by readers; extra-illustrated or cut up and reassembled; discarded, reused, and transformed into new paper objects – about literature’s participation in evolving (media) ecologies? We were joined by a wonderful group of speakers including Sarah Haggerty (University of Cambridge), Richard Menke (University of Georgia), James Mussell (University of Leeds), Deven Parker (Glasgow), Gill Partington (Institute of English, London) Orietta da Rold (University of Cambridge), Matthew Rubery (Queen Mary, University of London), and Sean Silver (Rutgers).
Big congratulations to Sarah Beyvers, whose talk “Rage against the Machine: Video Games, Queer Play and Ludic Resistance” won her the top prize of Passau’s Diversity Science Slam 2025. Her talk looked at breaking the rules in gaming — from exploiting “bugs” to express queer identities to staging political protests inside the game world.
Together with our colleagues from the English Department of Universität Passau, we hosted the annual Passau-Regensburg research colloquium in May 2025. As in the past years, the colloquium featured work-in-progress by doctoral students, postdocs, and guest speakers, with ample time for discussion and exchange. We were delighted to welcome guest speakers MariaDamkjær (Copenhagen), Florian Klaeger (Bayreuth), Gerold Sedlmayr (FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg), and Matthew Potolsky (Utah).
Summer Term 2024
Luisa Calè (Birkbeck), Vicky Mills (Birkbeck) and Katharina Boehm jointly hosted the second of a series of three conferences on media history and the material culture of the book in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This year’s conference, entitled “Books In and Out of Time: Genres and Formats of Media History, 1700-1900” (17-19 July 2024) featured papers by Ruth Abbott (Cambridge), Julia S. Carlson (Cincinnati), Penny Fielding (Edinburgh), Mike Goode (Syracuse), Rachael King (UC Santa Barbara), Michelle Levy (Simon Fraser University), Deidre Shauna Lynch (Harvard), Clare Pettitt (Cambridge), Robbie Richardson (Princeton), and Emily Senior (Cambridge). Speakers examined the codex's role as a paper archive in shaping the material culture of collections, spotlighting practices of collecting, cutting, pasting, and scrapbooking. Discussions often centred on ephemeral materials and specimens and explored how their entry, remediation, assemblage in (and, sometimes, expulsion from) book formats shaped early attempts to theorize the historical and material conditions of mediality.
In early July, Sarah Beyvers, Paul Hamann-Rose, and Dominik Schvartz organized this year’s Midsummer Night's Readings. The weather held and students and staff gathered on the meadow for an evening of readings and Renaissance choir music performed by the Hammerchor.
In June, Leo Mellor (Murray Edwards College, University of Cambridge) visited Passau to deliver a guest lecture on the tumultuous history of the Cambridge Festival Theatre in the late 1920s and 1930s and its legacy in twentieth-century and contemporary drama.
In conjunction with colleagues from the English Department of Universität Regensburg, we held the annual Passau-Regensburg Research Colloquium in May 2024. The research colloquium brings together distinguished guest speakers as well as postdocs and doctoral students. It’s a friendly, constructive forum for the discussion of research projects and work-in-progress. This year, Peter Boxall (University of Oxford), Claudine Van Hensbergen (Northumbria University), Clark Lawlor (Northumbria University), and Laura Otis (Emory) joined us as guest speakers. You can find the programme here.
Winter Term 2023-24
Keats’s death mask, Blake’s plough, Sterne’s periodical and serialized afterlives, and illustrated editions of Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year were some of the topics that speakers of the symposium “Literary Afterlives and Material Culture in the Long Eighteenth Century” explored in December 2023. For the event, our Erasmus+ guest professor Jakub Lipski (Kazimierz Wielki University) was joined by Mathelinda Nabugodi (UCL), James Wood (UEA), and Mary Newbould (Kazimierz Wielki University). Here's the programme: Programm.
Tim Sommer (Passau) and Anja Hartl (Innsbruck) organized the online workshop "Victorian Affects" which brought Victorian notions of affect in dialogue with contemporary theorisations of affect. Contributors discussed what an affect-oriented criticism can contribute to our understanding of Victorianism and its private, social, and “political emotions” (Martha Nussbaum), what methodological potential affect theory has for readings of canonical and non-canonical Victorian writing, and what the study of Victorian (con-)texts can add to the critical vocabulary of affect-based literary and cultural criticism. The workshop formed part of the DACH Victorianists network's event programme. Here's the programme: "Victorian Affects".
Summer Term 2023
Luisa Calè (Birkbeck), Vicky Mills (Birkbeck) and Katharina Boehm jointly organized the conference “Books In and Out of Time: Media, History, and Print Culture, 1700-1900”, which was held in Passau from 12-15 July 2023. Speakers from the US, UK and Germany discussed the book as a key medium of historical cognition that provided writers and readers with flexible ways of measuring, (re)ordering, and conceptualizing their relationship to different pasts and anticipated futures. Many papers asked how eighteenth- and nineteenth-century authors harnessed new technologies of reproduction, as well the book's capacity to engage with and host multiple media, in order to think about the different temporalities manifested by the material cultures of the book. Here’s the conference Programme.
Sarah Beyvers and Paul Hamann-Rose organized this year’s Passau Midsummer Readings. Staff and students came together for an evening of music and readings that featured texts by Tricia Hersey, Fintan O’Toole, Dorothy Parker, Margaret Attwood, David Henry Wilson and others.
The conference “Soil – Dirt – Earth: Ecologies below Ground, 1750-1850” explored how a focus on (literary and non-literary) figurations of soil, earth, and dirt can help us rethink Romantic and early Victorian perceptions of natural environments and how it might enhance our conception of ecologies. The conference was jointly organized by Katharina Boehm (Passau), Paul Hamann-Rose (Passau), and Frederike Middelhoff (Goethe-Universität Frankfurt). It took place on 22-24 June 2023. You can find the programme here: "Programme".
The annual Passau-Regensburg Research Colloquium took place on 11-12 May 2023. We were delighted to welcome a wonderful group of guest speakers: Matthew Stratton (UC Davis), Merrick Burrow (Huddersfield), Margaret Harper (Limerick), and Johannes Voelz (GU Frankfurt) all presented new work while our postdocs and doctoral students gave talks drawn from their research projects. You can find the programme here: "Programme".
Winter Term 2022-23
Two colleagues joined us for guest lectures and shared their work in progress.
In November 2022, Susanne Scholz (Goethe-Universität Frankfurt) gave a talk on “Uncanny Returns: Late Victorian Mummy Fiction”.
In January 2023, Rebecca Anne Barr (Jesus College, University of Cambridge) delivered a paper entitled “Laughing up their sleeves: Women’s Subversive Laughter” that presented material from her current project on laughter in women’s fiction of the eighteenth century.
Summer Term 2022
We kicked off the new annual Passau-Regensburg Research Colloquium on 23 and 24 June! The colloquium is jointly run by Katharina Boehm (Passau), Benjamin Kohlmann (Regensburg) and Anne Zwierlein (Regensburg). It brings together distinguished guest speakers, postdocs, and doctoral students and provides a forum for the discussion of research projects, work in progress, and current issues in the field.
Working-class writers, Enlightenment economies, and Romantic new media were just a few of the topics which speakers explored at the first colloquium. You can find the programme here: Programme.
A roundtable entitled “Publishing in Victorian Studies”, organized by Katharina Boehm under the auspices of DACH Victorianists, looked at current trends, publishing opportunities for early career researcher, and practical matters relating to the publishing process. Marco Caracciolo(Ghent University) and Monika Pietrzak-Franger (Universität Wien) joined the roundtable and shared their expertise and publishing experiences. The roundtable took place on 1 July 2022.
Together with colleagues in American Studies, Sarah Beyvers and Paul Hamann-Rose organized the Passau Midsummer Readings – an open-air event featuring literary readings, recitals, and music performed by staff and students.
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