Special Fellowship "Die deutsche Tischgesellschaft“

Research grant of the Kulturstiftung Schloss Wiepersdorf in cooperation with the Goethe- und Schiller-Archiv, Klassik Stiftung Weimar

Corinna Kirschstein lives in Halle (Saale). The theater scholar has been a lecturer at the Institute for Theater, Film and Media Studies at the University of Vienna since 2017. She studied theater studies and German language and literature at the University of Leipzig, where she also completed her doctorate with a dissertation on the beginnings of university theater studies research. From 2007 to 2010, she was a research assistant on a project funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) on the theater and film critic Herbert Ihering. She worked as a Lecturer at the Institute for Media Culture and Theater at the University of Cologne before moving to the Interdisciplinary Center for Pietism Research at Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg as a research associate from 2014 to 2016.

Her research focuses on the field of theater and cultural history of the early modern period. The focus of her interest is the question of how artistic and cultural performative practices structure identities as well as forms of sociability and publicity. She is also pursuing this in her habilitation project on "Formation Processes of Theater in the Early Modern Period," which is nearly complete.

During her stay in Wiepersdorf, Corinna Kirschstein will conduct research on the "Deutsche Tischgesellschaft," an exclusive circle of men from Prussian politics, science, and art founded by Achim von Arnim in 1811. Through the documents of the meetings of the "Tischgesellschaft" made accessible by the Goethe and Schiller Archive, she hopes to gain insights into their struggle for a new habitus, which is located in the area of tension between the dissolution of established structures around 1800 and longings for an ethnically and culturally homogeneous society, and whose own fragility becomes visible in demarcation from the enemy images (women, French, Philistines, and above all Jews).