International Conference (Verena Richter / Kurt Hahn), December 6-9, 2023

Here you can find the complete program of the lecture series 'Medienwelten: Constructions, Theories, Competences', which will be held at the Institute of Romance Studies in the winter semester 2022/23.

Media establish connections and overcome distances, media store and impart knowledge, media create, represent and sometimes distort reality. Media transmit signs, information or images, media distribute power and make us powerless. Today more than ever, media format our perception, control our desires and yet are also media of knowledge. In a deeply ambivalent way, media create the worlds in which we live and in which we learn, in which we act communicatively and in which we surrender to virtual simulations.

The teaching focus organized by the Institute of Romance Studies in the 2022/23 academic year, to which we cordially invite students and interested parties, addresses the omnipresence of media as well as their controversial definitions and functions. With almost one billion speakers, the Romance languages form a global network in which cultural interdependencies, socio-political negotiation processes and, last but not least, media interconnections interact. This teaching focus aims to make mediality comprehensible as a semiotic enabling structure, as an analog or digital practice, as a technological device or as a didactically reflected competence and to shed light on its concrete modes of action in the Romance-speaking world. Numerous courses in all Romance sub-disciplines (linguistics, didactics, literary studies, cultural studies) are dedicated to print media as well as audiovisual media (e.g. photography, film/series, comics), plurimedial forms of representation (e.g. advertising, theater, dance) or types of digital media (e.g. computer games, social media). Among other things, media effects in oral or written communication, the consequences of historical media upheavals, the staging of sophisticated media couplings or the exploration of media-supported teaching settings will be discussed.

The conference 'Fragile Idylls: For an eco-aesthetic of the Mediterranean' will take place in Graz from 3 to 5 November 2022 at the Department of Romance Studies at the University of Graz. Find the current conference program here / The conference 'Fragile Idylls: For an eco-aesthetic of the Mediterranean' will take place in Graz from 3 to 5 November 2022. Here you can find the complete conference program.

The guest lecture will take place on Monday, June 13, 2022 at the Institute of Romance Studies.

Thursday, June 2, 2022, Institute for Romance Studies

Research Colloquium Romance Literatures and Cultures of the Arqus International Forum on Romance Studies (AIFRS), as part of the Arqus university network between the universities of Bergen, Granada, Graz, Leipzig, Lyon 1 and 3, Minho, Padua, Vilnius and Wroclaw, Verena Richter / Kurt Hahn, online, April-June 2022.