Irina Hron

About Irina Hron

Docent 2020 (Venia legendi in German).

Dr. phil. 2014 (Comparative Literature).

Magister 2007 (Comparative Literature).

Irina Hron received her Ph.D. with distinction (“summa cum laude”) in Comparative Literature from the Ludwig Maximilian University Munich, Germany and the University of Agder, Norway in 2014; the first joint degree issued by the LMU Munich and the UiA. From 2011 to 2016 she was the DAAD Lecturer in the Department of Slavic and Baltic Studies, Finnish, Dutch and German at Stockholm University, Sweden.

She continued as a postdoctoral researcher in German-language Literature and Cultural Studies at Stockholm University for another one and a half years. In 2017 she joined the University of Vienna’s German Department as a Franz Werfel Fellow with a specialization in contemporary Austrian Literature. In October 2018 she accepted the offer for the Anna Ahrenberg Postdoctoral Fellowship of Literature at the University of Gothenburg’s Department of Literature, History of Ideas, and Religion, a position she presently holds. During the spring term 2019 she held a guest professorship at the University of Vienna in Austria. In 2020 she accepted the position of Lise Meitner Senior Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Vienna. Irina Hron was awarded the title “docent” (“Venia legendi”) from Stockholm University in 2020.

Her fields of research include European literature around 1900, contemporary literature, with particular focus on German-language and Scandinavian literature, discourses of neighborship and vicinity as well as contemporary aesthetics and literary theory (after Postmodernism). She is currently working on a book, provisionally entitled “Poetics of the Neighbor. Narrative, Ethics, and Vicinity”, which addresses the demand to rethink contemporary literary tales as well as ethical and political tropes of being and becoming neighbors.

Moreover, she specializes in the new emerging and quickly developing field of Skin Studies, studying the cultural, normative and aesthetic dimensions of skin through a broad set of perspectives. She is the author of “Hervorbringungen. Zur Poetik des Anfangens um 1900” (Beginnings. On the Poetics of Creating, Fabricating, and Generating around 1900) (2013) and the editor of volumes such as “Einheitsdenken. Figuren von Ganzheit, Präsenz und Transzendenz nach der Postmoderne” (Thinking in Unity: Figures of Unity, Presence, and Transcendence after Postmodernism) (2015) and “Leseszenen. Poetologie – Geschichte – Medialität” (Scenes of Reading: Poetics – History – Media) (2020). She is also a translator of contemporary Norwegian literature into German.

She has taught courses and seminars as well as supervised BA- and MA-theses in comparative literature and German literature at BA and MA levels for more than ten years in Germany, Sweden, and Austria.

Irina Hron has organized several international conferences in Munich, Vienna and Stockholm. She works closely together with a number of European cultural institutions, with houses of literature in Vienna, Munich, Stockholm and Gothenburg, Gothenburg’s opera as well as with the cultural departments of several European embassies.