Der Wiener Prater kann in mehrfacher Beziehung als ein Experimentierfeld der Moderne beschrieben werden. Bereits die Öffnung des Geländes für die Allgemeinheit unter Joseph II. im Jahr 1766 intendierte tiefgreifende gesellschaftliche Veränderungen. Im Geist der Aufklärung sollte hier ein Ort jenseits der traditionellen ständisch-religiösen Zeit- und Raum-Ordnung geschaffen werden. Was geschieht unter Bedingungen von Gleichheit und Freiheit? Der Prater blieb lange Zeit der bevorzugte Ort in Wien, wo technische, politische und kulturelle Innovationen ausprobiert und einer breiten Öffentlichkeit bekannt gemacht wurden, von waghalsigen Flugexperimenten bis zu modernem Körpersport.

Werner Michael Schwarz, PD., Historiker und Kurator im Wien Museum und Pratermuseum, Ausstellungen und Publikationen mit Schwerpunkt Stadt-, Film- und Mediengeschichte.

Susanne Winkler, Mag., Historikerin, Kuratorin im Wien Museum und Pratermuseum, Sammlungsbereich Topografie und Stadtentwicklung. Ausstellungen und Publikationen mit Schwerpunkt Stadt-, Fotografie- und Freimaurergeschichte.

The most beautiful thing about writing, as Mexican author Margo Glantz holds, is its potential to resurrect things bound to disappear. This notion of the commemorative, indeed restorative function of literature
is not only at the core of Glantz’s most widely read creative work, Las genealogías (1981; tr. The Family Tree, 1991), a reconstruction of her family’s emigration out of the Jewish Ukraine to life in post-revolutionary Mexico. It also finds a powerful coda in El mago de Viena (2005, tr. The Magician of Vienna, 2017), by her long-term interlocutor and friend Sergio Pitol (1933-2018). Defying genre, insisting upon literary genealogy, El mago de Viena was published in the same year that its author obtained the prestigious Cervantes Prize. It courageously rounds up what is called Pitol’s Trilogy of Memory,
together with El viaje (2000, tr. The Journey, 2015) and El arte de la fuga (1996, tr. The Art of Flight, 2015).

At the intersection of the connective writings of these two eminent Mexican literary globetrotters, Vienna emerges as a transitory and haunting presence. Drawing upon Diana Taylor’s distinction between archive and repertoire, and Sylvia Molloy’s observations on presence and ‘face value’ in autobiographical writing, this talk traces a sort of affective cartography between Glantz and Pitol, revisiting, among other real-life places, Heldenplatz and Fleischmarkt in Vienna, and Viena in Coyoacán, Ciudad de México.

Short Abstract
Beyond its imperial image, Vienna reveals itself as a mosaic of historically evolved urban micro-worlds. This contribution explores how the city’s Grätzel shape distinct architectural, historical, and socio-cultural identities, challenging the notion of Vienna as a homogeneous metropolis while highlighting its layered urban imaginary.
Abstract
How can a city be understood when its lived reality differs fundamentally from its dominant public image?
For many, Vienna is synonymous with imperial architecture, coffee houses, and the historic city centre. Yet this image captures only a fraction of the city’s urban reality. Rather than
constituting a homogeneous metropolis, Vienna is a mosaic of historically evolved neighbourhoods, commonly referred to as Grätzel, each reflecting distinct phases of urban development, architectural styles, and socio-cultural identities. From Biedermeier and Gründerzeit quarters to Jugendstil ensembles, modernist housing estates such as Alterlaa, industrial landmarks like the Zacherlfabrik, and contemporary developments such as Seestadt Aspern, Vienna unfolds as a city of multiple historical and cultural identities rather than a single, unified urban entity.
Viewed through this lens, Vienna’s neighbourhoods emerge as urban micro-worlds shaped not only by their built environment but also by their historical development, social composition, and everyday practices. Although interconnected within the metropolitan framework, they retain distinct spatial and cultural characteristics that give rise to different experiences of the same city.
Against this backdrop, the tension between Vienna’s lived urban diversity and its dominant international image becomes apparent. Reinforced by tourism, media, heritage conservation, and collective cultural memory, the imperial image of Vienna often obscures the plurality of its neighbourhoods and the layered histories embedded within its urban fabric. Rather than a homogeneous metropolis, Vienna emerges as a constellation of urban micro-worlds whose diversity constitutes the essence of its urban imaginary.

Biography
Anna-Clarissa Dirnbacher holds a degree in Spatial Planning from TU Wien. Her research focuses on urban design, public space, heritage conservation, and the relationship between urban form, identity, and cultural landscapes. Her current work explores how urban morphology, planning regulations, and collective perceptions shape the identity and image of cities.

Selected Publications:
Dirnbacher, A.-C. (2026). A Planning-Oriented and Regulatory Framework for the Systematization of Townscape Protection in Austria: Eastern Austria as a Study Region. In Book of Abstracts, EULiST Student Conference 2026 (forthcoming).

Dirnbacher, A.-C. (2024). Stadtbildschutz und Straßenraum in Wien: Eine Schnittstelle mit Konfliktpotential. Diploma thesis, TU Wien.

Dirnbacher, A. (2022). Contribution in A. Kanonier, K. Weninger, & B. Steinbrunner (Eds.), Semesterschwerpunkt Flächensparen. Sammelband WS 2021/22. TU Wien.

Dirnbacher, A.-C., Heintz, C., Mayrhofer, S., Sahindokuyucu, S., & Unterwalcher, A. (2021). LOKAL. REGIONAL. POLYZENTRAL. Stadtregion Wr. Neustadt: Räumlicher Entwicklungsplan. Project report, TU Wien.

Mozart’s Grosse-Messe in C minor, K. 427, remains to this day one of the great unfinished works in the history of music. We might claim to know everything about the ‘mysteries’ of the even more famous Requiem K. 622, a work whose genesis has given rise to many legends and even successful dramatizations: from Pushkin to the global success of Scheffer and Milos Forman’s Amadeus. By contrast, we know little or nothing of the circumstances that led Mozart first to begin and then to abandon the composition of the Mass halfway through. A true mystery, especially considering that in 1783, in Vienna, Mozart had no time to waste composing music that would remain unsold, written for pleasure or even merely for experimentation, or for a stubborn yet conscious aesthetic and artistic project. A work of considerable ambition, imposing in terms of its instrumentation and scale, and presumably intended for a high-ranking, princely or episcopal chapel, the undertaking of K. 427 appears, in fact, to have been a serious miscalculation on Mozart’s part. A gamble, and one undertaken, moreover, at a risky and extremely delicate stage of his career. Having recently resigned from his post as vice-maestro of the Salzburg bishop’s chapel, the musician had thrown himself into the lively, promising yet uncertain Viennese music scene, seeking to establish himself within the city’s aristocratic patronage circles. This paper therefore aims to reconstruct the historical, political and circumstantial reasons behind this unexpected professional catastrophe, examining it through the compositional and stylistic-musical choices adopted by Mozart on this occasion – choices based on assumptions that subsequently proved to be completely wrong. Unfortunately for him, but also for us: had things turned out differently, today we would have another complete Mozart masterpiece, perfect in every detail, to cherish and enjoy.  

Gerardo Tocchini is a full professor of Modern History at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. His main area of research is the social history of culture in early modern Europe, from the sixteenth century to the late nineteenth century, with a strong comparative focus and a marked emphasis on interdisciplinary historiographical methodology (literature, theatre, music and the visual arts). Among his books: I Fratelli d’Orfeo. Gluck e il teatro musicale massonico tra Vienna e Parigi (Olschki, Florence 1998); Minacciare con le immagini. Tintoretto: gli affreschi scomparsi della „Casa Barbariga“ (Edizioni di Storia e letteratura, Rome 2010); Arte e Politica nella cultura dei Lumi. Diderot, Rousseau e la critica dell’antico regime artistico (Carocci, Rome 2016; engl. ed., Voltaire Foundation, Oxford 2023); Su Greuze e Rousseau. Politica delle élite, romanzo e committenza d’arte nella tarda età dei Lumi (Edizioni della Normale, Pisa 2016); Voltaire epicureo. Il mito del „Settecento libertino“ (Carocci, Rome 2024: ingl. ed., Voltaire Foundation Oxford, currently being prepared)

My presentation develops a framework for analyzing urban imaginaries through contemporary Latin American supernatural fiction. Building on feminist urban theories emerging from the Hispanic context, it proposes the body-city continuum as a critical lens to rethink urban space. By foregrounding the supernatural component in narratives by Mariana Enriquez, Samanta Schweblin, Dolores Reyes and Cecilia Eudave, my talk examines how literary imaginaries challenge socio-spatial hierarchies and reconfigure relations between bodies and cities.

I am an Associate Professor of Literary Theory and Comparative Literature at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (ES). My research focuses explores the intersections between representations of the supernatural in fiction and literary urban studies, with a focus on gender. I am the author of the monographs The Urban Fantastic in Nineteenth-Century European Literature (Palgrave, 2021) and Space and the Postmodern Fantastic in Contemporary Literature (Routledge, 2015). I am the founder of the research network Fringe Urban Narratives and co-editor of the Palgrave Series in Literary Urban Studies.

Resumen:
Este trabajo analiza la ciudadanía imposible que Brigitte Vasallo explora en La fosa abierta. Anarchivo emocional de un milagro económico (2026) como parte del locus txarnego de la diáspora interna española. El texto aborda la expulsión de las clases campesinas pobres de sus territorios durante las décadas de los 50, 60 y 70 y su incorporación como mano de obra industrial urbana. Analizaremos los espacios y gramáticas urbanas de la expulsión y la negación epistémica que Vasallo investiga y que articula en torno a su propia experiencia afectiva, vital, familiar y de clase.

Abstract:
This paper analyses the notion of “impossible citizenship” explored by Brigitte Vasallo in La fosa abierta. Anarchivo emocional de un milagro económico (2026), as part of the locus txarnego of Spain’s internal diaspora. The text addresses the expulsion of impoverished peasant classes from their territories during the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, and their incorporation into urban industrial labour. I examine the urban spaces and grammars of expulsion, as well as the epistemic negation that Vasallo investigates and articulates through her own affective, biographical, familial, and class-based experience.

Sara R. Gallardo is a researcher and writer. She holds a PhD in Humanities from the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid and is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow (MSCA-PF) at the University of Vienna, where she has developed the project Mad Literature: Own Epistemologies from First-Person Voices (MadLit) (2024–2026). She is currently in the third year of her contract (2026-2027), funded by the University of Vienna itself.

Ever since Bernardo Verbitsky coined the term in Villa miseria también es América, the villas miseria have occupied a prominent place in Argentine literature. More recent works, such as César Aira’s La villa (2001) or Ariel Magnus‘s La 31 (Una novela precaria) (2012) use specific narrative strategies—most notably pseudodiegesis— to represent the villas. Rather than reinforcing a mimetic illusion, these techniques foreground the constructedness of narration, prompting readers to renegotiate their relationship to both text and represented reality.

This paper investigates the aesthetic and epistemic functions of these narrative strategies and argues that they are symptomatic of a broader tendency in contemporary literature to confront urgent social and political realities through anti-mimetic forms of representation.

After holding substitute professorships at the Universities of Münster, Würzburg, and Cologne, Matthias Hausmann currently teaches French, Spanish, and Latin American Literature and Media Studies at the University of Vienna. Following his doctoral dissertation on nineteenth-century French anti-utopian literature, he completed his habilitation thesis on the influence of cinema on the narrative works of Adolfo Bioy Casares. His current research interests include narratology, fantastic literature, science fiction, the interrelations between literature, film, and comics, as well as the grotesque in literature and film. His recent publications include Unheimliche Codes, Kanäle und Apparaturen. Zur Macht der Medien in französischsprachiger Literatur (2026; co-edited with Kurt Hahn and Marita Liebermann) and Adolfo Bioy Casares und das Kino. Film und Literatur als gegenseitige Herausforderung (2026).

Esta ponencia analiza la representación de la ciudad como una distopía a través de la novela Iris de Edmundo Paz Soldán. En la obra, el espacio urbano se proyecta como un asentamiento neocolonial y tóxico, diseñado por un poder corporativo y militar para la explotación extrema de sus
habitantes. Para soportar las condiciones de esta metrópoli devastada, los individuos viven y perciben la ciudad a través de alteraciones mentales, drogas y fanatismo religioso, lo que facilita su sumisión. Sin
embargo, frente a este control absoluto del entorno físico y psicológico, surgen en los márgenes movimientos de resistencia que utilizan su propia cultura y creencias para enfrentarse al imperio. En conclusión, el texto evidencia cómo la ciencia ficción proyecta las ciudades del futuro como enclaves de explotación, pero también como trincheras donde la identidad y la rebelión intentan sobrevivir.

Ana Portillo Cárdenas (Contratada Predoctoral PIF FPU Ministerio de Educación en la Universidad de Sevilla)

On the Border(s): Federico Campbell’s Tijuana examines Tijuanenses (1989) as a short-story collection shaped by overlapping borders. Campbell’s Tijuana is at once a real city facing the United States and a shifting territory of memory, desire, nostalgia, and hallucination. Through Todo lo de las focas and the other stories, the urban space of the 1950s reappears in fragments: streets, photographs, voices, bodies, and mirages. The presentation reads this frontier city as a literary construction where personal remembrance, collective history, and invention continually remake one another.

Alessandro Secomandi is a lecturer in Spanish American Literature at the University of Bergamo. He works on Colombian and Mexican literature, comparative studies, the fantastic, and the Gothic.

Alexandra R. DeRuiz’s Crucé la frontera en tacones (2023) narrates the undocumented passage from Mexico City via Tijuana to Los Angeles of a transfeminine person. This paper reads these cities as open and productive spaces in constant movement (Massey, 2005), Tijuana crossed by the border as an “herida abierta” (Anzaldúa, 1987) and by the non-places of the migratory corridor (Augé, 1999), i.e. the “hieleras”. Drawing on Locane (2016), Ortiz Guitart/Mendoza (2008) and Watson/Quayson (2023), it shows how walking in heels reappropriates policed streets and turns fear into an affective cartography. Urban palimpsests thus emerge as confrontation: the city does not welcome, it expulses, imprisons or, in case of DeRuiz, it is won step by step.

Short bio
Alexandra Ofner holds a Master’s degrees in Hispanic and German Philology (University of Vienna) and Latin American Studies (University of Barcelona). She is a doctoral student and university assistant at Vienna’s Institute of Romance Languages. She has organized international conferences, and is member of the comitee of the Midwest Association of Latin American Studies and member of the editorial team of Quo vadis Romania. She has published articles in journals and anthologies.

Bibliography
Anzaldúa, Gloria (²1999 [1987]). Borderlands/La frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books.

Augé, Marc (2000 [1992]). Los no lugares. Espacios del anonimato. Una antropología de la sobremodernidad. Barcelona: Editorial Gedisa.

Castells, Manuel (1989). The Informational City: Information Technology, Economic Restructuring and the Urban-Regional Process. Oxford: Blackwell.

DeRuiz, Alexandra (2023). Crucé la frontera en tacones, Crónicas de una TRANSgresora. Barcelona/Madrid: Editorial Egales.

Locane, Jorge J. (2016). Miradas locales en tiempos globales: Intervenciones literarias sobre la ciudad latinoamericana. Madrid/Frankfurt a.M.: Iberoamericana/Vervuert.

Massey, Doreen (2005). For space. London: Sage Publications. Monsiváis, Carlos (1995). Los rituales del caos. Mexico: Ediciones Era.

Moreno Carranco, María; Ruisánchez Serra, José (2023). From Altepetl to Megacity: Narrating Mexico City as World Literature. In Ato Quayson; Jini Kim Watson (eds.). The Cambridge companion to the city in world literature. Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press, 232-247.

Ortiz Guiart, Anna/Mendoza, Cristóbal (2008). “VIVIR (EN) LA CIUDAD DE MEXICO. Espacio vivido e imaginarios espaciales de un grupo de migrantes de alta calificación”. In Latin American Research Review, Vol. 43, No. 1, 113-138.

Quayson, Ato; Watson, Jini Kim (2023). Introduction: World Literature, Cities, and Urban Imaginaries. In Ato Quayson; Jini Kim Watson (eds.). The Cambridge companion to the city in world
literature. Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press, 1-13.

Turner, Victor (1967). “Betwixt and Between: The Liminal Period in Rites de Passage”. In The Forest of Symbols. New York: Cornell University Press, 93-111.

Turner, Victor (1969). “Liminality and Communitas”. In: The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. Chicago: Aldine Publishing, 358-374.

In 20th-century Latin American narratives, the figure of the witch typically operates within domestic spaces or on the margins of rural life (Cortázar, Ocampo, Fuentes). By contrast, in 21st-century literary works, the witch emerges as an agent within the city, destabilizing contemporary understandings of urban space. Rather than serving as a relic of the rural or pre-modern past, the witch is embedded in the contemporary city, challenging its systems of organization, visibility, and control. This paper argues that urban space functions as a dynamic structure, continually redefined through its interaction with the witch figure, thereby exposing fissures in discourses of rationality, progress, and order. The relationship between the witch and the city is shaped not solely by oppositions such as countryside versus city or center versus periphery, but by a complex interplay of territory, violence, and embodied knowledge. Although many narratives appear to be set in rural or Andean contexts, the city consistently emerges as a horizon, a threat, or a structuring force. To analyze this relationship, the study integrates contributions from spatial theory (Lefebvre, de Certeau, Foucault) and theories of the imaginary as it relates to space (Bachelard) with close readings of contemporary fiction. The analysis focuses on selected works by Mariana Enríquez (Argentina), Mónica Ojeda (Ecuador), Solange Rodríguez Pappe (Ecuador), and Fernanda Melchor (Mexico), which are fundamental for illustrating the nuanced relationship between urban space and the construction of the urban witch character.

The city of Paris served as an inspiration for literary creation among many women writers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. But these writers did not come to Paris solely driven by the opportunity to pursue their literary work there; they also sought to live a free life, far from the social, political, ideological, and cultural constraints of their respective countries, and to experience the city from a professional and gender perspective more aligned with their interests.

Professor of Literature at the University of Granada. Coordinator of the Master’s Program in Latin American Studies. Visiting Professor at the University of Delaware, Montclair State University, and Brown University. He directs the Research Group Hybris: Latin American Literature and Culture and the journal Letral. Corresponding member of the North American Academy of the Spanish Language. He has published more than 80 books and over 200 articles on literary criticism.

Based on the novels El astillero (1961) by Juan Carlos Onetti and Mugre rosa (2020) by Fernanda Trías, this presentation examines the representation of the shipyard in Uruguayan literature as a microcosm in which the city’s decline is condensed. Through a shift from the urban space to its productive periphery, the shipyard’s ruin becomes a metonymic image of collective failure. The stagnation of production and the immobility of its inhabitants embody the impossibility of a future, creating a space condemned to ruin that mirrors a city unable to move forward or renew itself.

Luna Delmonte obtained her Bachelor’s degree in European, American and Postcolonial Languages and Literatures from Ca’ Foscari University of Venice in 2021 and her Master’s degree in Hispanic American Literatures from the same university in 2024, with a thesis on Juan Carlos Onetti. She has presented her research at international conferences and published articles in academic journals. Since September 2025, she has been a PhD student at the University of Vienna, where her research focuses on the infernal and apocalyptic underpinnings that connect fictional Latin American cities of the twentieth century.

En apenas una década, la narrativa colombiana evolucionó desde los espacios míticos y ancestrales, englobados en el arquetipo de Macondo, a otros más reales, donde la ciudad era vista como un espacio conflictivo, en permanente crecimiento, con tensiones sociales y demográficas continuas, como recreó Luis Fayad en Los parientes de Ester (1978). Unos años más tarde, la ciudad moderna se convertiría en lo que Fernando Vallejo llamó “la morada de Satanás” o la “monstruoteca” en La Virgen de los sicarios (1994), un topos siniestro, marcado por las formas complejas de la violencia procedente del narcotráfico.
Palabras claves: Macondismo, ciudad, narconarrativa, Fayad, Vallejo, violencia.

José Manuel Camacho Delgado, profesor de Literatura Hispanoamericana

A lo largo de su obra literaria, la autora uruguaya Fernanda Trías ha resignificado el espacio de la ciudad (teniendo como referentes Barcelona, Buenos Aires, Montevideo y Bogotá)  desde múltiples enfoques –ya sea a través del confinamiento y la asfixia, la figura del flaneur o la migración al interior–. La comunicación propuesta busca trazar una panorámica de cómo su narrativa se sirve del espacio urbano para mostrar el sentimiento de desarraigo y soledad moderno.

María Alonso Herrero es contratada predoctoral en el departamento de Literatura Española e Hispanoamericana de la Universidad de Sevilla. Ha formado parte de varios proyectos de investigación, entre los que destaca ANTROPOLIT (Literatura y Antropoceno: imaginarios ecosociales y conciencia ambiental en la literatura hispánica del siglo XXI), aún en curso. Ha realizado estancias de investigación en la Universidad Pontificia Javeriana de Bogotá, en la Universidad Pontificia Católica del Perú y en la Universität zu Köln. Ha participado en diversos congresos, nacionales e internacionales, publicado sus trabajos en revistas y volúmenes colectivos y coordinado simposios y seminarios. Trabaja en una tesis sobre infancia, Antropoceno y distopía en la literatura hispanoamericana escrita por mujeres en los últimos años.

Terrains Vagues are vacant lots, abandoned factories, blast furnaces, scrap yards, and landfills. They bear witness to their former use, when many people gathered there to work. But there are also magnificent squares and central locations in a city that have lost their function and now are abandoned. They bear witness to the moments when people gathered there to hold parades, organize political meetings, and celebrate carnival. They, too, are “lieux de mémoire” (Pierre Nora), with the difference that they were not dedicated to industrial production but to public space. In any case, these are all forgotten, neglected places and not public monuments. — With regard to literature, it is worth recalling Carlos Fuentes’s famous statement: “La literatura es una memoria activa que se opone a la momificación de la historia.” Some novels of French-language literature from the Antilles explicitly fulfill this function of memory. In his latest two-volume novel, “La Savane, Papa de Gaulle et la Négresse en déveine” (2025/26), Raphaël Confiant remembers the historical events that took place at a central location in Fort-de-France (Martinique) and are shaped by the relationship with the former colonial power, France. In “Mourir pour Haïti” (1980), Roger Dorsinville describes the events that took place on the Champ de Mars in Port-au-Prince and paints a picture of the country under the Duvalier dictatorship and U.S. influence. The lecture compares the two novels against the backdrop of the historical context of their settings.

Jörg Türschmann is professor for French and Spanish Literature at the Department of Romance Studies, University of Vienna. Further research interests are television series, film music, popular culture, and transnational relations between Argentine, French, German, and Spanish literature and cinema. He obtained a PhD about French Film Theory and wrote his habilitation thesis about 19^th Century Serial novels in Spain, France, and Italy. He has published several books on transnationality in literature, cinema, and television. 
Jörg Türschmann – University of Vienna

As dystopias are overwhelmingly linked to urban environments, the metropolis serves as the ultimate physical manifestation of state power, industrial overreach, and human alienation. While cities dominate the genre, the tension between urban spaces and rural life is plain to see in Edward Bellamy’s American bestseller, Looking Backward: 2000–1887 (1888) and William Morris’s novel News from Nowhere (1890) which was explicitly conceived and written as a fictional counter-model to urban existence: “an epoch of rest”.

While both authors were committed socialists fighting the inequalities of their late 19th-century societies, they had incompatible views on what a perfect future should look like. This presentation will examine some of these differences in the conceptual context of an earthly paradise. According to Schiller: “All peoples, who have a history, have a paradise, a state of innocence, a golden age; yes, every individual man has his paradise, his golden age, which he remembers with more or less enthusiasm, according as he has more or less of the poetic in his nature. The experience itself, therefore, offers sufficient traits to the picture of which the pastoral idyll treats”.

Finally, the long-lasting suspicions related to a Republic of Scholars will be addressed. Both, Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock’s constitutional utopia Die Gelehrtenrepublik (1774) and Arno Schmidt’s homonymous post-apocalyptic novel (1957) might provide material for the deconstruction of the Bellamy-Morris debate.

Biobibliography

Gerald Bär is currently assistant professor (professor auxiliar com agregação) at the Universidade Aberta in Lisbon, Portugal. He teaches online in the areas of German and Comparative Literature, Film Studies and Translation Studies. His publications include various books and articles on the translation and reception of Ossian and several studies on the motif of the Doppelgänger in literature and film. He is member of CECC (Research Centre for Communication and Culture), IVG (Internationale Vereinigung für Germanistik), AIM (Associação de Investigadores da Imagem em Movimento) and BSECS (British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies).

Recent publications:

“The Orphic ‘fleeting glimpse’ in some of its Remediations”. Amaltea. Journal of Myth Criticism 17(2) (2025), pp. 1-11 (https://doi.org/10.5209/amal.100026)

“Ossianomanie und Aeronautik. Karoline von Günderrode zwischen populärem Zeitgeist und kritischer Selbstbespiegelung”. In Noch Zukunft haben. Zum Werk Karoline von Günderrodes. Serie Neue Romantikforschung. F. Middelhoff, M. Wernli (eds). Berlin, Heidelberg: J.B. Metzler, 2024, pp. 135-162.

“Performative Aspekte von Spaltungsphantasien: vom Doppelgänger zum Avatar. Eine literaturhistorische und terminologische Problematisierung verwandter Begriffe”. In Der Wille zur Wiederholung II: Der Doppelgänger in Literatur und Film. J. Türschmann, S. Contardo, N. Miller (eds). Series: Serienräume – global, lokal, glokal (SGLG). Wiesbaden: Springer VS., 2025, pp. 3-28.

Taking the historic Italian piazza and Toni Schmale’s Tanke 24/7 in Vienna as a mirror-image constellation, my presentation examines the piazza not as a mere physical space of urban sociality, but more so as an urban imaginary that produces and stages a particular image of collective life. While the piazza appears as a historically established site of encounter, Schmale’s artificial tank station evokes similar practices of gathering, lingering and sociality. A Situationist reading asks how such spatial imaginaries are produced, appropriated and potentially détourned.

In Freshkills. Recycler la terre (2020) by Lucie Taïeb, we follow the author-narrator on her journey to Staten Island, on the outskirts of New York, where a vast landfill site is being transformed into a public park. This paper aims to shed light on the duplicity of urban modernity, described by Zygmunt Bauman in Wasted Lives (2004), as it manifests in Freshkills, which shows the hidden side of modernity. It is incarnated both physically and metaphorically, thereby highlighting the apparent utopia’s dystopian nature, which is imbued with a sense of the uncanny, as defined by Sigmund Freud.

Hanna Nohe is a lecturer at the university of Vienna. She studied in Freiburg, Salamanca & Berlin. Her doctoral thesis (Bonn, Paris-IV & Florence) analyses 18th century cultural identities (Fingierte Orientalen erschaffen Europa, 2018). She habilitated on migrant subjects’ socioeconomic perspective in current literatures from the Global South (De Gruyter 2024). Presently she is working on literature and waste in literature and film.

What happens when the trauma of migration is described not, as is often the case, through the medium of autobiography, but through the imaginative lens of literary dystopia?
This paper aims to analyze three case studies – Laura Pugno’s Sirene (2007), Niccolò Ammaniti’s Anna (2015), and Veronica Raimo’s Miden (2018) – demonstrating how, in these dystopian narratives, spatial movements simultaneously serve as metaphors for temporal movements. If it is true that the stranger, as Kristeva notes, undergoes a process of regression, then the city, as a simultaneous, transcultural space, becomes at the same time a symbolic space in which the protagonists renegotiate their relationship with childhood, dolescence, and adulthood.

Tommaso Meozzi is an Assistant Professor at the Institute of Romance Studies at the University of Vienna, where he specializes in Italian literature and media. His main research interests include literary and filmic dystopia, autobiographical narratives related to experiences of migration (both from Italy and to Italy), and the representation of the COVID-19 pandemic in Italian culture. In addition to various articles, he has published a book on literary and filmic dystopia (Visioni dell’alienazione, Pacini, 2017).

Léda Dimitriadi lives in Paris and is Professor at the Ecole nationale supérieure d’architecture Paris-Val de Seine. She holds a Habilitation to supervise research (Ecole Normale Supérieure-PSL), a Ph.D. and a Diploma of Advanced Studies (DEA) in Aesthetics and Art Sciences (University of Paris 1 Pantheon-Sorbonne), as well as a Diploma in Architecture Engineering (National Technical University of Athens). Her research topics are architectural theory, history of construction, philosophy of science and digital technology.