Thomas Mohnike

Fellowship 2013

ARCHIVE

Thomas Mohnike is senior lecturer and director of the department of Scandinavian Studies at the Université de Strasbourg. He had studied in Charleston, S.C., Kiel, Uppsala and Berlin, before writing his doctoral thesis in Freiburg on Imaginative geographies in Sweden before and after the end of the Cold War. He has initiated and coordinated several research and collaboration projects as for example the EUCOR network in Scandinavian Studies (Basel, Freiburg, Strasbourg, Tübingen, since 2003/4), and Strasbourg at the discovery of the North. Digitizing and valorization of rare Nordic books of the Bibliothèque nationale et Universitaire de Strasbourg (2011-2013). Since 2013, he is the founding president of the French Association for Nordic Studies. With Thomas Beaufils, he is editing Deshima. Journal of the Global history of the North, and with Charlotte Krauss and Urs Urban the book series Globalizing Fiction. Transdisciplinary perspectives on arts & letters as objects of cultural practice. His principle research fields cover the imaginative geographies of Northern Europe, geographies of knowledge of the North, and the cultural history of Nordic (post-)colonialism and nationalism.
Recent publications include Imaginierte Geographien. Der schwedischsprachige Reisebericht der 1980er und 1990er Jahre und das Ende des Kalten Krieges, (2007), Auf der Suche nach dem verlorenen Epos. Ein populäres Genre der europäischen Literatur des 19. Jahrhunderts / À la recherche de l’épopée perdue. Un genre populaire de la littérature européenne du XIXe siècle, edited with Charlotte Krauss (2011), Regards sur l'histoire africaine des pays nord-européens, edited with Thomas Beaufils (2011), and Dreams of Valhalla. An application for iPad – in collaboration with Gabriela Antunes, Giacomo Bottá, Pierre-Brice Stahl, and Arthénon(2013).

Building the North with words. Geographies of scientific knowledge in European philologies 1850–1950

Fellows Fribourg-Strasbourg: Joachim Grage et Thomas Mohnike
Post-doctorant : Michael Riessler

Article in the Uni Wissen, January 2015

The project analyzes the use of the languages, cultures and literatures of Scandinavia in France, Germany and Scandinavia in three developing branches of academic knowledge – comparative philology, literary history and Sami studies – between 1850 and 1950. In these fields, academics depicted the North often either as the home of liberty, the last wilderness, a refugium of melancholy or birthplace of an industrious Germanic warrior culture, that opposed to Southern superficialness and laziness. These imaginative geographies of the North were evidently depending on political contexts and local needs and were not the same in Freiburg, Strasbourg, Copenhagen or Paris.
The project proposes to analyze thus 1) the changing and conflicting versions of imaginative geographies that the actors of the field evoked by using Scandinavian literatures and cultures and 2) how these seemingly delocalized scientific models depended on ever different (political, didactic, esthetic, ideological, formal...) local needs and practices – on venues, regions and cultural circulation, to speak with Livingstone.
The project proposes thus the first distinctly transnational dynamic geography of scientific knowledge of the North as not only a history of a scientific discourse, but also as a result of doing and performing scientific work.