Prof. Dr. Szilvia Gellai as a visiting scholar at IGL
2025-11-07 As part of the program to promote visiting scholars with a focus on intersectional gender studies, Prof Dr Szilvia Gellai will spend the winter term 2025/26 as a visiting professor at the Institute of History and Literary Cultures (IGL), where she will be involved in both academic teaching and research.
While her complementary seminar explores the epistemological potential and literary representations of boundaries, her seminar in the Master's program ‘Critical Studies’ focuses on defiant ways of life, with an emphasis on black and queer lives. Guest lecturers invited to these courses include media artist Ida Kammerloch, whose video works will also be shown publicly on 5 November 2025 in the Kunstraum Leuphana, and literary scholar Sophie Liepold, who is researching James Baldwin's estate at the University of Vienna. As part of the visiting professorship, a workshop on intersectional perspectives on the cultural technique of reading will take place on 29-30 January 2026. On 3 December 2025, Szilvia Gellai will speak about Ann Cotten's volume Florida-Räume in the event series 10 Minuten Lyrik (10 Minutes of Poetry). Last but not least, on 26 November 2025, she and Prof. Dr. Kevin Drews will present the jointly edited special issue of the journal Forum for Modern Language Studies on the aesthetics and politics of humour in Walter Benjamin.
Prof Dr Szilvia Gellai studied art at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz and German language and literature at Eötvös Loránd University Budapest and Humboldt University Berlin. She completed her doctorate at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology with a dissertation on network poetics in contemporary literature (Stuttgart: J.B. Metzler 2018). Since 2020, she has been a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of German Studies at the University of Vienna, where she researches and teaches at the intersection of literary, media and cultural studies. In winter 2021, she was a fellow in the LOEWE research cluster ‘Architectures of Ordering’. Her recent publications include the essay Glass Scenographies: Notes on Spaces of One's Own (Weimar: M BOOKS 2023) and articles on her habilitation project ‘Bauformen der Transparenz. Lebensversuche unter Glas’ (Forms of Transparency: Life Experiments under Glass) in the journals Kritische Berichte, Technikgeschichte and Figurationen.