PD Dr. phil. Hamid Tafazoli

I am a scholar for German and Cultural Studies and teach currently at the University of Bielefeld. I am interested in the intersections between literary theory, narratology, comparative studies, cultural & intercultural studies and philosophy. My work is mostly concerned with the German, French and Anglophone traditions from the eighteenth century through to the present. I also am interested in the intercultural relationship between the German and the Persian cultures in the literature of the classical period to the present.

I wrote my doctoral dissertation on the Germanophone Discourses on Persia with a comparative method of research that concentrates on the reception of the Persian culture and literature form the ancient Iran to the Classical period in the Germanophone literature from the early modern period to the Romantic. My dissertation Der deutsche Persien-Diskurs: Zur Verwissenschaftlichung und Literarisierung des Persien-Bildes im deutschen Schrifttum. Von der frühen Neuzeit bis in das neunzehnte Jahrhundert (2007) was honored with the Award of the Humanities and Social Sciences 2006 of the Sybille-Hahne-Foundation of the University of Münster.

Between 2009 and 2010, I held a Feodor Lynen Fellowship of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation at the Department of German Studies of the University of Washington (Seattle, WA). During that period, I worked on my project Heterotopia and co-edited (with Richard T. Gray) the book on External Space – Co-Space – Internal Space. Heterotopias in Culture and Society (2012). At the University of Washington, I also started my research on literature and the memory of culture and explored my research with the example of Johann Gottfried Herder’s studies on the Ancient Persian culture as an example for the German literature of Enlightenment, of Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s Hafez-Studies as an example for the German literature of Classical period and of Günter Grass’ novel as an example for the German contemporary literature.

As a Humboldtian, I was invited by the Department of German Studies of the University of Bielefeld in February 2011 where I started my Habilitation. In October 2013, I was honored with a Fonds National de la Recherche Luxembourg for my research project on Gestern Migranten – Heute Bürger. Kritische Reflexionen über den Stellenwert einer Migrationsliteratur aus interkultureller Perspektive at the Institute of German Language, Literature and for Intercultural Studies of the University of Luxembourg. In October 2015, I was honored with a Marie Curie Fellowship Award of the European Commission. The outcome of my research is my habilitation treatise and the monograph Narrative kultureller Transformationen. Zu interkulturellen Schreibweisen in der deutschsprachigen Literatur der Gegenwart (2019).

Other interdisciplinary areas of my research include the literary reflections on social order and individual desire in the German period of Literary Realism, the figurations of Refugees in the cultural memory of Europe and the discourses on culture and migration in the Germanophone literature after 1980. In June 2022, I was invited by the journal arts to serve as the guest editor of the special issue on The Representations of Islam in Germanophone Literature: Cultural Perspectives from the Enlightenment to the Present.

I have previously held visiting teaching, lecture and research appointments at the University of Münster, the University of Washington (Seattle, WA), the University College Cork in Ireland, at the University of Luxembourg and at the University of Strasbourg (France).

Alongside of my university researches on German literature, I also have a distinct interest in the Tango Argentino in the context of cultural performance and semiotics. During my researches on Heterotopia, I began my work on Tango Argentino and on the Milonga as the space of its performance. My article on Verwandlung (Transformation) published in the journal tanz. Zeitschrift für Ballett, Tanz und Performance (02.21, 2021, pp. 48-51) describes Tango Argentino as a semantic system which reflects the desire for experiences of connections and emotions beyond of the social restrictions.

I have several interviews and speeches on the topics with social and cultural relevance as on Nationalism, Heimat, Migration and Memory of Culture. In my academic life, I have always strived for dialogue between science and society. In March 2022, I founded Profesolutions . The institute for Language, Communication, Rhetoric and Aesthetics with the aim of promoting the efficient transfer of knowledge between science and society.