SFB/TR 427
Telling stories
The Transregio CRC examines ancient, medieval and early modern narratives from different cultural contexts.
People have always told stories. Across all eras and cultures, narratives have played an important role in social cohesion. The Transregio CRC "Historical and Transcultural Narratology", which will begin in 2026, investigates pre-modern, i.e. ancient, medieval and early modern narratives from different cultural contexts. The Collaborative Research Center aims to develop a new historical-transcultural narrative theory that overcomes the bias of current narratologies and their narrow focus on Western and modern or postmodern traditions. The narrative theory is intended to capture different historical narrative formats and functions from very different cultural contexts and open up new paths for comparative, interdisciplinary literary and cultural studies on a global level.
The researchers come from 16 different disciplines, including Egyptology, Korean studies, theology, Greek studies and Slavic studies. Their questions are: How did people in past cultures tell stories? In what contexts, for what purposes? What did their stories look like? The expected research results should enable both a comprehensive historical and transcultural comparison of storytelling from a global perspective and offer a fundamentally new view of the genesis, variability and functions of narrative forms.
At the same time, the researchers from the University of Freiburg (spokesperson: Professor Eva von Contzen), Bochum and Bonn want to test and further develop the possibilities of digital humanities in order to anchor comparative narrative research more firmly in the digital realm. To this end, they will work closely with the Digital Humanities Lab at the Faculty of Philology at the University of Freiburg and the Center for Digital Humanities in Bonn.
