16/10/2018, by CLAS

Dr Kathrin Yacavone awarded a prestigious Humboldt Research Fellowship

Kathrin Yacavone, assistant professor in French in the Department of Modern Languagesand Cultures, was awarded a Humboldt Research Fellowship for Experienced Researchers from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, which enables internationally outstanding researchers to pursue an extended period of research in Germany.
The fellowship will enable Dr Yacavone to complete her book project Portrait of the Writer: Photography and Literary Culture in France (see www.portraitofthewriter.com). The study will provide a new critical and historical context for photographic portraits of writers, showing that since the advent of photography in the mid-nineteenth century, easily reproduced portraits were and remain a highly effective and influential means of authorial (self-) construction. A combined cultural history of photography and textual authorship, it explores multifaceted relations amongst renowned French writers and portrait photographers, thus revealing significant and hitherto neglected visual dimensions of French literary history and theory from the 1830s to the 1980s. The book’s multidisciplinary approach entails extensive archival research, text and image analysis, and cultural-historical synthesis of written and visual material.
Starting in February 2019, Dr Yacavone will spend the first six months of her fellowship at the University of Constance, working with Professor Bernd Stiegler – an internationally renowned expert on photography history and theory, with expertise in French literature and culture – and a further six months at the University of Cologne to collaborate with Professor Wolfram Nitsch, a highly regarded scholar in nineteenth-century French studies and media history, as well as the interaction between literature and photography.

“While bringing my own research expertise to Constance and Cologne, the Humboldt Fellowship will allow me to establish working international and cross-disciplinary relationships with these major European universities, and beyond, furthering comparative and transnational approaches to French studies. I see such international collaboration as essential to my discipline, as well as to the humanities more generally.”

Kathrin Yacavone, Department of Modern Languages and Cultures

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