At UOL we aspire to create synergy between hermeneutically and aesthetically oriented literary scholarship and more empirically oriented literary scholarship. We are interested in developing the methodologies of literary studies by exploring the current tendencies towards postcriticism and surface and midlevel reading within a broadly conceived formalist regime developing out of traditions of close reading, but also in opening up literary scholarship to studies in (re)medialisation as well as more empirical approaches that utilize methodologies from social and health science such as interviews, observations, surveys, and statistics.
We have particular specializations in welfare studies, narrative medicine, and new studies in ageing, class, and gender, including new literary historical studies of those categories and subject matters.
Research in the Center is organized into 5 clusters: