As a first-year doctoral student, the practical details of my project remain in flux. This page provides a general overview of my research goals in general, and those specifically applicable to my final thesis.
My overarching research goals are of an interdisciplinary nature, as I wish to bridge the cultures and languages of science and literary studies while exploring the possibilities of practical applications for understanding how the human brain interacts with texts and narratives, specifically in the areas of learning and empathy.
My proposed areas of research lie on the intersection between neuroscience, cognitive science and literary theory, as well as requiring the application of both the German and English languages and literature. My primary research question is “what narrative and neurological factors determine a reader’s experience of the text or the information embedded therein?” This work incorporates recent trends towards cognitive theory in the humanities (Dehaene, De Vignemont, Singer), and the emerging status of neuroscience and cognitive science (Damasio, Iacoboni, Pinker) as disciplines with widely applicable, cross-contextual potential, into a literary analysis of a text and the reader’s neurological and mental interaction with the textual narrative.
My doctoral project goal is to build a reader-text interaction theory that is truly universally applicable, based an understanding of the neurological and narrative elements that influence a reader's experience of a text. Working with the literature, theorists, and history of multiple languages and cultures presents me with the opportunity to analyse and compare inter-cultural, cross-lingual reader reactions. Constructing my literary theoretical framework on the biological and neurological processes of the reading brain provides the opportunity to develop reproducible empirical evidence, increasing the robustness of my work.