This year, the Lange Nacht der Wissenschaften will also showcase a specially designed panel exhibition of ‘Happy in Berlin: English Writers in the City’ which is a joint project between the University of Oxford and Humboldt University. ‘Happy in Berlin: Berlin through English Eyes’ is a project that charts how English-speaking writers encountered the city of Berlin in the early twentieth century and how they wrote about it in their published and private works.
Speaking for an Oxford in Berlin website exclusive, exhibition co-editor/curator, Stefano Evangelista (Oxford) commented:
Gesa Stedman and I are thrilled to feature our ongoing project on English writers in Berlin as part of this year’s Lange Nacht der Wissenschaften. We will be showing for the first time a specially designed panel exhibition that we commissioned after our 2021 show ‘Happy in Berlin’, for which the Oxford-Berlin Research Partnership provided crucial support. The Lange Nacht exhibit concentrates on politics, psychoanalysis and pleasure, and includes material on the different political choices made by English academics in Berlin during National Socialism. It seems particularly fitting to bring these stories back, as it were, to the university.
Stefano Evangelista is associate professor of English literature at Oxford University and one of the Oxford Berlin Research Partnership's first Einstein Fellows. He specialises in the literature of the turn of the twentieth century, viewed from comparative and transnational perspectives. His monograph, Literary Cosmopolitanism in the English Fin de Siècle: Citizens of Nowhere, was published by Oxford University Press in 2021. Stefano Evangelista has held visiting professorships at Bologna, Chuo University, Paris Nanterre, and Paris Sorbonne. He has been a regular visitor to Berlin since the early 2000s and, since 2013, he has been a fellow of the Centre for British Studies, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin.
Gesa Stedman is professor of British culture and literature at the Centre for British Studies, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. She undertook her research on the Victorian discourses of emotion as a visiting graduate at Harris Manchester College, Oxford and initial research for the Berlin project as a visiting scholar at Trinity College, Oxford. Other interests include cultural and literary exchange between England and France, and between England and Germany. Her most recent publication with a literary and historical focus is a special issue on World War I and its aftermath, published in the Journal for European Studies in November 2021.
For your chance to view the project’s panel exhibition, please register via email (events.gbz@hu-berlin.de) Alternatively, to attend in the overall festivities of the Lange Nacht, including the ‘Happy in Berlin’ exhibition, please purchase your tickets from the event website (link in 'sign up').
