Mending is a provisional practice born out of necessity—a precarious way of dealing with broken objects and bodies. Usually portrayed as an activity carried out by (poor) women, it is an activity that does not lead to a work. The research project, however, aims to observe and analyze mending as a way of dealing with what is broken that is not so much geared towards restoring things to be intact, but rather turns to fractures, scars, and seams as means and materials to make something new. It thus complies and reads together a heterogeneous series of scenes of mending in literature, art and philology—scenes that unfold rather quietly, and largely without any concept, on the fringes of aesthetic and poetic realms, yet also at times within the economic and social sphere. The project aims to recover the underresearched epistemological, poetic, and ethical potential of this poor and largely negatively connoted practice, thus harnessing it for a critical concept of reparation.
PROF. DR. DR. JUDITH KASPER
CURRICULUM VITAE
Judith Kasper has been a professor of comparative literature at Goethe University Frankfurt since 2018. After studying German and Romance languages and literature at the universities of Nice, Göttingen, and Freiburg, she earned her first doctorate in Freiburg with a dissertation examining the theme of forgetting in the works of Proust, Perec, and Barthes. She then pursued a second doctorate in philosophy, focusing on the concept of homeland in the twentieth century through the works of Benjamin, Schmitt, Heidegger, Celan, and Bachmann. After a DAAD lectureship in Paris, she held various academic roles at the universities of Bologna, Verona, and Venice. From 2009 to 2018, she worked as a research fellow at the Institute for Romance Philology at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. In 2015, she completed her habilitation in Potsdam, where she explored the idea of “traumatized spaces” in the works of Freud, Levi, Kertész, Sebald, and Dante. After interim professorships in Munich and Frankfurt an der Oder, she was appointed a full professor in Frankfurt am Main in 2018. Her research focuses on the interface between philology and psychoanalysis, on literary theory, on Holocaust studies, and on poetry and translation theory. She is co-editor of RISS: Journal for Psychoanalysis.
