Update on EPESEP Work Package #3: Reading List

Expert Panel for the Austria Feminist Reading List / The first 9

Current reading recommendation lists for school lessons at Austrian schools consist of 88% to 100% of the works "of old white men". Feminist narratives hardly appear in it. School is one of the most important places of socialisation – both in the sense of reading and through reading. Stories tell readers what they can be and what they can become in this world. It is therefore important to discuss canonisation and literary historiography for the school anew!

Since 2023, together with an expert committee consisting of authors, literary scholars, educational scientists, publishers, booksellers and teachers, ≠igfem has been developing a feminist reading list for German lessons for the lower and upper level, which we will send to the Ministry of Education after their completion, the educational directorates of the individual federal states as well as to the schools themselves. The aim of the project is to put together a canon that conveys modern female and male role models and depicts the history of women and feminists.

Below is an update about our wonderful, Austrian expert panel!

📌 Read more here on the ≠igfem website

1. TANJA RAICH, author and editor. Worked as a juror, program manager at Kremayr & Scheriau until 2020, currently: program manager for literature and children's books at Leykam.

   1. Novels: "Jesolo" (Blessing 2019) & "Schwerer als das Licht" (Blessing 2022)

   2. Editorship: "Das Paradies ist weiblich" (Kein & Aber 2022) & "Frei sein" (Kein & Aber 2024)

2. TANJA OBEX, PhD, educational scientist and university assistant at the Department of Educational Sciences in Music Education at the mdw Vienna. Her work focuses on pedagogical ethos, teacher professionalism, knowledge and science studies; education and decoloniality; education for sustainable development.

3. SANDRA FOLIE, PhD, literary scholar and member of the project “Black Narratives of Transcultural Appropriation” at the Leibniz Centre for Literary and Cultural Research in Berlin. Her research focuses on Afro-European literatures and intersectionality and is closely linked to questions of canonization: Who is read in which context (how) and why (not)?

4. JULIA PÜHRINGER is a journalist and film critic who likes to think, write and ask questions. She writes for tele, Falter, Der Standard and an.schläge, among others. Whether in film, literature or elsewhere, she is passionately interested in the question of the representation of women's art and its reception and canonization.

5. BEATE HAUSBICHLER studied philosophy at the University of Vienna and has been an editor at Der Standard since 2008, heading its women's policy section dieStandard since 2014. Her most recent publication is: “Der verkaufte Feminismus. Wie aus einer politischen Bewegung ein profitables Label wurde” (2021) and "Geradegerückt. Vorverurteilt, skandalisiert, verleumdet: Wie Biografien prominenter Frauen verzerrt werden” (together with Noura Maan, 2023).

6. Dr. VERONIKA SCHUCHTER is a Senior Scientist at the Department of German Studies at the University of Innsbruck. She studied German Philology and received her doctorate in 2012 on the topic of victim, heroine and perpetrator narratives in literature and film. Her research focuses on contemporary literature, literary mediation and gender studies. She has been working on power structures and socio-political issues in literature for many years.

7. RABEA KOHNEN is a Germanist medievalist. She has been working as an assistant professor with tenure track at the University of Vienna since 2019. Her work focuses on historical narratology, material philology and cultural studies issues in the field of intersectionality. Her current book project deals with the self-fashioning of medieval narrators and exegetes, using the voice and figure of Mary of Nazareth as a model and examining in particular the significance of femininity in these narratives.

8. DAGMAR KAINDL, born in Lower Austria in 1968, was culture editor at the weekly magazine NEWS (1993 - 2016) and was head of the literature department there for sixteen years. She has been a freelance contributor to Buchkultur magazine since 2017. From 2011 to 2020, she was a member of the Literature Advisory Board of the Austrian Federal Chancellery.

9. CLAUDIA SACKL, MA MA, is a research assistant at ISEK - Popular Cultures at the University of Zurich and a lecturer at the Department of German Studies at the University of Vienna. From 2017 to 2023 she worked as a research assistant at STUBE Vienna, from 2019 to 2023 she was head of the Literary Courses. Her research focuses on multimodal and transmedia narrative forms, postcolonial studies, critical race theory and its intersections with gender studies, queer theory and ecocriticism. In her doctoral project, she is researching contemporary German- and English-language Afro-diasporic literatures.