Staff profile

Alexis Radisoglou's research interests are in the field of 20th-century and contemporary literature, film, and visual culture, with a particular focus on comparative, transcultural, and interdisciplinary forms of enquiry. Located at the interstices of aesthetic and cultural theory, political philosophy, and the environmental humanities, most of his work is concerned with the role of aesthetic production in negotiating the political, historical and epistemological challenges of the contemporary condition of globality.

He is currently engaged in two research projects titled, respectively, 'Post-Global Aesthetics' and 'Eurozone(s): Literary Imaginaries of Contemporary Europe'. For the latter project, he was awarded a Leverhulme Research Fellowship for the academic year 2022-23.

Post-Global Aesthetics

Drawing on an engagement with contemporary literature, film, and visual art, this project seeks to examine the conditions of possibility for a ‘post-global aesthetics’. Against an understanding of globalization as a process of radical systemic integration, it analyzes the role of contemporary cultural production both in interrogating the conceptual, epistemological and socio-political strictures of the paradigm of the globe-as-one and in instantiating new forms of inhabiting a shared planet. How, it asks, can works of art address legitimate grievances about the social, political and environmental depredations of a globalized world without reverting to the identitarian logic of a merely anti-global thinking? And how can they attend to the differential histories of human life on planet Earth while eschewing the presumptions of a Eurocentric or falsely universalist species-talk? A ‘post-global aesthetics’, in this context, emerges as a domain of difference, ecological diversity, pluriversal entanglements, and heterogeneous space-time relationships through which new forms of a ‘planetary relationality’ become imaginable. While grounded in detailed analyses of specific works of art, the project also provides a critical examination of key discourses that have shaped recent discussions in the interdisciplinary humanities, including those of transculturality, planetarity, decoloniality, cosmopolitics, world literature, epistemologies of the South, and the Anthropocene.

Eurozone(s): Literary Imaginaries of Contemporary Europe

The European continent, over roughly the last decade, has been facing a series of internal crises that have brought questions over the unity and future of any European project into sharp relief. The research project ‘Eurozone(s)’ is concerned with the role of contemporary literature in interrogating Europe’s status as a shared but contested site of belonging and a common but uneven ground for democratic participation and political agency. To speak of ‘Eurozone(s)’, thereby, is to depart from a homogenizing or narrowly economistic understanding of Europe and to emphasize instead a plurality of cultural self-imaginings, and specific, often fraught, moments of contact and transfer across linguistic, geographical and political boundaries. Through an engagement with texts from Germany, Greece, France, Spain and the United Kingdom, the project examines issues such as the precarious nature of any foundationalist discourse about Europe; the manifold instances and political valences of a discourse of ‘crisis’; and the constitutive role of translation and cultural transfer in the ‘imaginary institution’ of European society. In doing so, it seeks both to address the fractures and often contentious nature of such a European self-imagining and to unveil alternative visions of its cultural and historical legacies and future.

Dr Radisoglou received a BA in Modern Languages and Literatures from the University of Oxford, and a PhD in German and Comparative Literature from Columbia University, New York. Before coming to Durham, from 2016-2019 he was a Fellow of Lincoln College and a member of the Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages at the University of Oxford. Besides his activities in the field of German Studies, he is an inaugural member of the international research network 'Greek Studies Now', initiated in 2019 by the Universities of Oxford and Amsterdam. Together with Professor Claudia Nitschke, he was also the co-convenor of an international postgraduate summer school titled 'Dis/Connections: Vernetzung und Digitalität in der deutschsprachigen Gegenwartsliteratur', which was held at Durham in July 2023.

PhD Supervision

Candidates interested in pursuing a PhD in areas such as contemporary German literature and film; political aesthetics; (post-)global culture; environmental humanities; transculturality; contemporary Europe and the European/global South; comparative literature; critical theory; and modernist studies are encouraged to get in touch via email.

• 2024: External Examiner: School of Modern Languages, Maynooth University, Ireland
• 2022: Leverhulme Research Fellowship: for the project 'Eurozone(s): Literary Imaginaries of Contemporary Europe'

Book review

• Radisoglou, A. (2018). Jenseits der Pässe: Wolfgang Hildesheimer — Eine Biographie. Modern Language Review, 113(1), 277-279. https://doi.org/10.1353/mlr.2018.0184
• Radisoglou, A. (2017). Amy J. Elias and Christian Moraru, eds. The Planetary Turn: Relationality and Geoaesthetics in the Twenty-First Century. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2015. https://doi.org/10.1080/00168890.2017.1256743

Chapter in book

• Radisoglou, A. (Post-)Global Constellations. In A. Byford, & C. Nitschke (Eds.), Modern Languages and Cultures: A Handbook. De Gruyter
• Radisoglou, A. (2022). Ethnoplanetarity as Postglobality: Four Theses and a Postscript on a Contemporary Decolonial Constellation. In G. Müller, & B. Loy (Eds.), Postglobal Aesthetics: 21st Century Latin American Literatures and Cultures (29-44). De Gruyter. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110762143
• Radisoglou, A. (2019). Ethnoplanetarity: Contemporaneity and Scale in Patricio Guzmán’s Nostalgia de la luz and El botón de nácar. In S. Ferdinand, I. Villaescusa Illán, & E. Peeren (Eds.), Other Globes: Past and Peripheral Imaginations of Globalization (195-211). Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14980-2
• Radisoglou, A. (2018). Catastrophic Histories, Planetary Futures: Aesthetics for the Anthropocene in Alexander Kluge, Sebastião Salgado, and Anselm Kiefer. In G. Dürbeck, & J. Nesselhauf (Eds.), Representations of the Anthropocene in Literature and the Media (199-217). Peter Lang. https://doi.org/10.3726/b15048
• Radisoglou, A. (2018). "Cet objet de plus en plus réduit qu’est le monde"? Vom Globus und Planeten bei Christoph Ransmayr und Laurent Mauvignier. In M. Frenzel, K. Geist, & C. Oberrauch (Eds.), Ein Ort, viel Raum(theorie)? – Fiktive Imaginationen gleicher Orte/Räume (93-111). University of Bamberg Press. https://doi.org/10.20378/irbo-54399

Journal Article

• Radisoglou, A. (in press). Towards a Symptomatology of Globalization and Its Discontents: Geoengineering, Immunology, and the Phantasma of Sovereignty in Reinhard Jirgl's Nichts von euch auf Erden. Monatshefte (Madison, Wis. 1946. Online), 117(3),
• Radisoglou, A. (2022). Anthropocene Realism: On Nikolaus Geyrhalter's Erde and the Limits of a Cumulative Aesthetic. Austrian Studies, 30, 47-62. https://doi.org/10.1353/aus.2022.0007
• Radisoglou, A., & Schaub, C. (2022). Introduction: Figuring the Planet: Post-Global Perspectives on German Literature. The Germanic Review: Literature, Culture, Theory, 97(2), 125-133. https://doi.org/10.1080/00168890.2022.2074273
• Radisoglou, A. (2021). What is the EU Novel? Arche-Teleology, Queer Temporality, and the Contested Domain of Europe in Robert Menasse's Die Hauptstadt and Angela Dimitrakaki's Aeroplast. Modern Language Review, 116(4), 553-587. https://doi.org/10.5699/modelangrevi.116.4.0553
• Radisoglou, A. (2016). "Ist der Schreibtisch vielleicht der Ort der Gespenster?" Hantologie, Erinnerung und Alterität in Wolfgang Hildesheimers Tynset und W.G. Sebalds Austerlitz

Other (Digital/Visual Media)

• Radisoglou, A. (online). 'Interview mit Fatma Aydemir und Hengameh Yaghoobifarah'. Web project 'literatür'. Goethe Institute Istanbul