Affiliation: University of Vechta
Keywords: More-than-Human Stories – Memory Studies – Meaning-Making
Simon currently works as a postdoctoral scholar in the DFG-project „Natural-cultural Memory in the Anthropocene. Archives, Media, and Literatures of Earth History” (2024-2026), which addresses cultural dimensions of planetary crises such as climate change or the sixth mass extinction from the perspective of interdisciplinary memory studies. He is also conducting a smaller project in citizen humanities on natural-cultural transformation in Lower Saxony collecting individual climate stories by citizens.
An overarching interest of Simon’s research is, how human meaning-making is embedded into the more-than-human world and how cultures respond to our changing planet. He follows this interest in different areas of research, among them planetary literary theory, literature of the Anthropocene, Nature Writing, posthuman narratology, and poetics of geology. At the intersection of literature and knowledge, his work brings together cultural and literary theory with different fields of scientific knowledge such as climatology, earth system science, or ecosemiotics, developing planetary and ecological perspectives on German literature from the 18th to the 21st century. He is also interested in questions of literary and ecological education and forms of participative research in the Environmental Humanities.
Selected publications: With Gabriele Dürbeck and Christoph Schaub. Anthropozäne Literatur. Poetiken – Genres – Lektüren (2022); Planetary Textuality. Reading Asmus Tratusch’s “Die Urwälder Europas” (2022); Instauration der Erde. Konstitutives Erzählen im Anthropozän und die kritischen Zonen der Literatur (2023); Sinn in der Klimakrise. Über eine planetare Literaturtheorie (2024).
https://www.uni-vechta.de/kulturwissenschaften/lehrende/probst-simon
https://www.uni-vechta.de/en/natural-cultural-memory-in-the-anthropocene/natural-cultural-memory
Image Copyright: Maria Rapela