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Sarah Link

University of Freiburg
English language and literature
PhD Student with Eva von Contzen
ERC Starting Grant "Lists in Literature and Culture“

Phone +49 (0)761 203-97348

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Sarah Link studied English Literature and Literary Theory and Italian at the University of Freiburg and at Trent University in Peterborough (Canada). She wrote her MA thesis on representations of Byronic Heroes in popular culture and currently pursues her PhD as a member of the ERC-funded project “Lists in Literature and Culture”. Her research interests include representations of identity and alterity in popular culture, sensation and detective fiction, literature and science, particularly in the 19th century, and cognitive literary studies.

 

FRIAS Research Project

“Lists in Police Work and Detective Fiction in Nineteenth-Century England – a Reception-Theoretical Analysis”

My research project is part of Eva von Contzen’s ERC project “Lists in Literature and Culture” and examines lists as narrative elements through which strategies of categorization and sense-making can be illustrated. The project considers the emergence of forensics as a scientific practice alongside the formation of the literary genre of (British) detective fiction in order to trace parallel developments in believes about order, logic, and the objectivity of science in literary and sociocultural contexts. I read lists as cognitive tools which establish connections between disparate objects or conditions and thus serve as a crucial ordering principle and structuring device for both nineteenth-century literary texts and newly emerging scientific and professional practices. The aim of my project is to demonstrate how lists can serve to either affirm or renegotiate established and emerging structures of order in both literary and cultural contexts.