Cultures of vigilance can only be explored taking their long history and broad cultural variability into account, as well as how these cultures change, are modified and shift throughout history. “Transformation” is used to describe transformation processes that cannot simply be understood as diachronic sequences; that is commonly accepted forms of society divided and organized to adhere to archetypal ideals (such as antiquity, the Middle Ages and modern times, or the development of face-to-face societies to the anonymous constellations that exist today). These transformations often take place below the framework of epochal changes and constitute the effects of cultural transfer and cross-cultural interweaving.
Project C01
Vigilance and attentiveness. Literary dynamics of self-observation and the observation of others in medieval religious literature.
The project investigates how Christian vigilance in the context of repentance, confession, and penance is thematised, propagated, and reflected upon in vernacular texts dating from the late Middle Ages, and how the dynamics of self-observation and the observation of others are expanded upon in the religious vernacular literature of that period.
Project C02
The Hidden, suspicious, changeable sex. Shame and vigilance in the Early Modern Period
The project explores the tension between shame and vigilance in relation to theories and practices of gender standardisation during the early modern period.
Project C03
At the intersection of observances. Italian literature of the 17th century between censorship and criticism
Italian literature in the 17th century inhabited a space at the intersection of religious censorship and poetological criticism: a space which is often reductively modeled as one dominated solely by restrictions and constraints. However, the project is dedicated to mapping the creative potential and special writing techniques that existed under such watchfulness, and explores forms of attention related to it, based on innovative (for the time) non-Aristotelian standardized genres such as the novel and opera in particular.
Project C07
Vigilance in social transition. Roma women in prostitution in Košice (Slovakia) and Most (Czechia) from the 1980s to 2004
The project examines vigilance as a practice, a discourse, and as a societal mission at a local level. Using two cities as examples, the project aims to investigate how vigilance towards the publicly visible sex work being carried out by women from the Roma ethnic minority was generated and how this attentiveness was translated into action.
Project C08
Unknowingness and vigilance in Shakespeare
This project examines the relation between unknowingness and vigilance in England at around 1600, particularly in the works of William Shakespeare.