Research

The Author as Activist: Literature, Politics, and Celebrity (2022-2026) 
Project V911: supported by the FWF Austrian Science Fund as part of its Elise Richter programme.

Art and Action: Intersections of Literary Celebrity and Politics (2018-2021); project T922: supported by the FWF Austrian Science Fund as part of its Hertha Firnberg programme.

What do such diverse authors as Benjamin Disraeli, Bernardine Evaristo, and Salman Rushdie have in common? They form part of long tradition of Anglophone writers who have made use of their public profiles to stage powerful political interventions. Where celebrities from the fields of performing arts and entertainment have earned criticism and ridicule for their forays into political activism, eminent writers have often been hailed as moral compasses, voices of reason, and prophetic insight. This project takes a historical perspective on the cultural authority of the writer as a tool of socio-political activism. Through selected case studies from the British context, covering a time period from the nineteenth century to the present, it reveals how this authority emerges from the interplay of literature, politics, and celebrity culture.

The book project rethinks the established cultural histories of literary authorship, political activism, and celebrity by bringing them together through the perspective of life-writing. It argues that authors shape and sustain their cultural authority through ‘autobiomyths’: modes of self-presentation that get circulated through autobiographical formats and that often revolve around the idea of the writer as acute critic of the zeitgeist. 

Auden Musulin Papers: A Digital Edition of W. H. Auden’s Letters to Stella Musulin (Project P33754)

Funded by the FWF Austrian Science Fund, this three-year project (2021-2024) casts a fresh light on one of the most prolific periods in the life and work of British-American poet W. H. Auden (1907-1973) through previously inaccessible archival material. It will result in an open-access scholarly digital edition of letters and literary papers in the estate of Welsh-Austrian writer Stella Musulin (1915-1996), who was Auden’s closest friend during the poet’s extended periods of residence in Kirchstetten, Lower Austria, from 1958 until his death.

Based at the Austrian Centre for Digital Humanities and Cultural Heritage (ACDH-CH), and carried out in collaboration with the State Collections Lower Austria, the Computer Vision Lab at TU Wien, and the Estate of W. H. Auden, this project not only yields new insights into Auden’s poetic composition and material writing practices, his personal and professional networks and relationships, but also adds a vital chapter to Austria’s socio-cultural and political history in the 1960s and 70s.

Auden in Austria Digital (Project P37139)

Building on the Auden Musulin Papers project, Auden in Austria Digital (AAD) aims to collect, investigate, and make openly accessible all archival papers by W. H. Auden held by Austrian institutions, thus providing a unique and comprehensive resource for studying the poet’s later life and work.

This FWF-funded research project (2024-2027) will be carried out with a large number of partner institutions, including the Austrian National Library, the Vienna City Library, the State Collections Lower Austria, and the Austrian Society for Literature. 

Both life-writing and celebrity – as practices, phenomena and fields of research – are concerned with the notions of authenticity and intimacy, public and private, accessibility and aloofness, myth-making and revelation. Both explore the tension between individual agency and the shaping and appropriation of public images by cultural and socio-political frameworks, media industries, ideologies, and a whole network of agents. In spite of their many shared concerns, the close interconnections of life-writing and celebrity have only recently begun to be specifically addressed. The research strand on celebrity and life-writing I am co-ordinating at The Oxford Centre for Life-Writing aims to contribute towards a more sustained dialogue between these two closely interwoven fields and to trigger a conversation about what we as scholars and ‘practitioners’ may gain from combining their theories and methodologies. How can we benefit from integrating a life-writing perspective into our work on celebrity, and how does thinking about the nature of celebrity, the conditions of producing and consuming celebrity, change the way in which we write, read and study life narratives?