Poetics, poetry and philosophy (conceptions of nature, memory), Cultural change (forgiveness, individual and cultural memory), Globalisation (literature and globalization), Historiography of literature, Literary epochs (Europe after 1700), Modernity (urban culture), Narrativity/storytelling (the function of storytelling), Philosophy of education and history of the concept of education ('Bildung' and secondary education), Semiotics and semiology (discourse analysis, literary and cultural semiotics), Structuralism, World literature (globalization and literature)
Poetics, poetry and philosophy, History of aesthetics after 1735, History of criticism, Literary epochs (German classicism and romanticism, Romanticism), Philosophical aesthetics, Text theory and analysis, Theory and History of Aesthetics
Poetics, poetry and philosophy (Aesthetics of the war, Literature and ethics, Memory, Poetics of the war, Witness Literature), Cultural history (Cultural history of the war, Germany and the second world war, Memory theory, The air war, Vergangenheitsbewältigung), Essay writing and cultural journalism, History of criticism (War and literature), Literary epochs (20th century, Christoph Ransmayr, cultural memory, German postwar literature, Imre Kertész, Thomas Bernhard, W.G. Sebald, War literature), Text theory and analysis