Prof. Dr. Julia Borst

Julia is the Principal Investigator of the ERC Starting Grant project AFROEUROPECYBERSPACE at U Bremen. Furthermore, she is the deputy director of the Institute of Postcolonial and Transcultural Studies (INPUTS¹) and co-founder of the WoC lab “Digital Diaspora”² at U Bremen.

Within the ERC project, she focuses on the entanglements of online and offline writing and activism in France and Spain exploring intertextual networks that transcend the digital. Her approach does not read the writings circulating online as a segregated corpus, but puts them into dialogue with printed texts authored by agents known to be digital key figures (e.g., printed theoretical texts, autobiographies or autofictions, (short) fiction, poetry).

In her previous research project, funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG, project no. 353492083³), she how literary texts written by African and Afrodescendant authors in Spain articulate the ambivalence of diasporic existence and how they negotiate Afrodiasporic identity constructions and multiple belongings in postcolonial Europe. Among others, the project resulted in various academic articles⁴ and the essay collections Personas africanas y afrodescendientes en España ayer y hoy: proyecciones y posicionamientos en la literature, el arte y los medios (Open Access, De Gruyter, 2024) and Women’s Perspectives on (Post-)Migration: Between Literature, Arts and Activism – Between Africa and Europe (Open Access⁵, Olms, 2023).

Julia holds a PhD in Romance literary studies from U Hamburg with a doctoral thesis on representations of violence and trauma in contemporary Haitian literature. She has won several academic prizes for excellence in research and teaching: Abioseh Porter Best Essay Award⁶ 2023 awarded by the African Literature Association, Heinz Maier-Leibnitz Prize⁷ 2021 awarded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) and the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), Sibylle Kalkhof-Rose Academy Prize for the Humanities⁸ 2019 awarded by the Academy of Science and Literature, and the Berninghausen Prize⁹ 2016 awarded by U Bremen.

Julia is the author of a monograph on violence and trauma in contemporary Haitian novels (Gewalt und Trauma im haitianischen Gegenwartsroman: Die Post-Duvalier-Ära in der Literatur.¹⁰ Edition lendemains 39. Tübingen: Narr, 2015). She has published articles in various international journals such as The French Review, French Studies, The Journal of Haitian Studies, Research in African Literatures, Tydskrif vir Letterkunde, Romance Notes and Open Cultural Studies. Moreover, she has co-edited numerous special issues and essay collections on Afroeuropean literatures, diaspora and postdigitality, decolonial feminism in the Caribbean, representations of violence in the Spanish-speaking Americas and notions of body and capital in the French novel of the 19th century.

Her wide research interests include Afroeuropean studies, diaspora studies, diasporic communities and (post-)digitality, postcolonial and decolonial theory, decolonial gender and queer studies, body studies, multidirectional memories in the literature of the Global South, (postcolonial) ecocriticism, violence and trauma in literature, Caribbean studies and Hispanophone Africa.

Contact Info

University of Bremen
Faculty 10 – Linguistics and Literary Studies
Bibliotheksstr. 1
28359 Bremen
Tel: +49 (0)421 218 – 68424

Mail: borst@uni-bremen.de

Website: https://juliaborst.de/