AG

Annette Gilbert studied General and Comparative Literature, Eastern European Studies and Communication Studies in Berlin, Paris and Kazan’ (Russia). After holding university positions in Moscow, Novosibirsk, Tomsk, Göttingen, Berlin, Boulder/Colorado and Mainz, she is now Academic Director at the Department of German and Comparative Literature at FAU.

As a literary scholar, she is particularly interested in the mediality and materiality of literature and phenomena on the border between art and literature. She specializes in avant-garde and experimental literature and art in Europe and North America. Even if these artistic radical approaches tend to be on the fringes of literary practice – some even beyound it – they can be read as a substantial contribution to foundational literary research, as they bring to light the subliminal prerequisites, but also the neuralgic issues and contradictory aspects of how we deal with literature. In this way, they contribute to the discussion of fundamental questions of literary theory, such as authorship, the concept of the work, the understanding of literature, the original and the copy.

In addition, she has been working for years on the historical changes in cultural techniques as well as publishing and distribution practices. This adresses issues of publicity, circulation, censorship, subversion, underground, samizdat and copyright, which are also of central interest to the Research Training Group. Following a research project on “Artistic Print on Demand” with exhibitions at the German National Library in Leipzig (2023) and the Villa Stuck in Munich (2024), she is currently leading the DFG network “The Knowledge of Digital Literature”. She is also working on Wikipedia as a new consecration authority in the literary field and on the pirated prints of the West German student movement of 1968, which has lost none of its relevance given the digital shadow libraries of the present day (which, incidentally, are also very popular in academic circles).

Selected publications in the field of literature and the public sphere:

  • Library of Artistic Print on Demand, https://apod.li/ (KatalogLibrary of Artistic Print on Demand. Post-Digital Publishing in Times of Platform Capitalism, zs. mit Andreas Bülhoff, Leipzig: Spector Books 2025.
  • Die weißen Räume der Literatur. Mediale Infrastrukturen als „vermachtete Arena“ literarischer Öffentlichkeit. In: Aida Bosch / Antje Kley (Hg.): Literatur und mediale Öffentlichkeiten. Orientierende Fallstudien. Metzler 2025, 25-47, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-69735-1_2.
  • <container class =”Artefakte der Avantgarden 1885-2015″>, zs. mit Cornelia Ortlieb, Andreas Bülhoff, Timo Sestu und Susanne Klimroth, Darmstadt: wbg 2023.
  • ‚Wikability‘. Über die Wikipedia als neue Konsekrationsinstanz im literarischen Feld. In: Jahrbuch der Deutschen Schillergesellschaft 67 (2023), 227–255, https://doi.org/10.46500/83535512-009.
  • Auchliteratur. Weichenstellung im Heute für die Philologie von Morgen. In: Deutsche Vierteljahresschrift 97:4 (2023), Themenheft Gegenwartsliteratur als Herausforderung des Literarischen, hg. von Carlos Spoerhase und Juliane Vogel, 1103–1114, https://doi.org/10.1007/s41245-023-00232-7.
  • Digitale Literatur II, zs. mit Hannes Bajohr, München: Text + Kritik. Sonderband, München: edition text+kritik im Richard Boorberg Verlag 2021.