Sebastian Schirrmeister Joins CSMC

1 March 2022

Photo: Sebastian Schirrmeister

The literary scholar joins the Cluster of Excellence on 1 March. He will be working on the project 'Wandering Artefacts: The Materialistic History of German-Jewish Archives'.

For Sebastian Schirrmeister, it is a new beginning and a return at the same time. The literary scholar worked as a research assistant at Universität Hamburg from 2011 to 2019. Here, he taught at the Department for German Language and Literature, did research on exile literature, and in 2017 completed his doctoral thesis on the topic on the entanglement of German and Hebrew literature written in Palestine and Israel after 1933. His first time in Hamburg was followed by two years at the Lichtenberg-Kolleg in Göttingen, where Schirrmeister worked on his project ‘Legitimate Passions. Reflections on Revenge (Fantasies) in Modern Jewish Writing’. As of 1 March, he is joining CSMC, where he will take on the role of Research Associate on the project ‘Wandering Artefacts: The Materialistic History of German-Jewish Archives’, which is led by Giuseppe Veltri and will run until the end of 2024.

‘I am looking forward to representing Jewish studies in this large bouquet of topics and disciplines that the CSMC encompasses’, Schirrmeister says. For him, the move to the Cluster of Excellence, where he will be part of ‘Archiving Artefacts’ (Research Field E), is connected with a change of perspective. ‘Thus far, I have worked a lot in archives and wrote both my MA and my doctoral thesis with archive material. Now, I will be working on archives. The archives themselves become the object of research. They are not simply a material basis or a means to an end.’ He expects the change in perspective to provide new insights: ‘Archives have a material dimension, of course, but at the same time they are always a reflection of certain power relations. I'm curious to see what conceptual thoughts on archives I can develop here.’