Doctoral student Joscha Valentin Jelitzki was awarded the Franz Werfel Fellowship by the Austrian Agency for Education and Internationalisation (OeAD) in the spring of 2024. He is currently in Vienna conducting the research that the Fellowship was awarded to support.
Joscha joined the department in 2019 as a PhD student in German and Judaic Studies. In his dissertation he describes the aesthetics of desire in modernist literature from Jewish writers in fin-de-siècle Vienna. In contrast to our contemporary notion of desire as forming an identity, his project rediscovers desire as something that constitutively splits the subject. The project further demonstrates how Jewish-Christian differences were conceived as sexual differences in Central Europe around 1900.
Before coming to UConn Joscha studied in Berlin, Frankfurt/Oder, and Jerusalem, and worked as a research assistant for the critical edition of the works of Hannah Arendt. At UConn he teaches courses on German language, literature, and cinema. He has published an article on the poetics of Martin Buber’s life writing (Martin-Buber-Studien 2022, co-authored with Sarah Ambrosi). His article on the biblical figure of Job and its modern reception, co-authored with Dr. Sebastian Wogenstein, is accepted for publication. Currently, Joscha is writing an article on the recent emergence of German Jewish gangster rap.
The Franz Werfel Fellowship is allowing Joscha to further a specific dimension of his doctoral research. In 2022, he presented a chapter draft at the Viennese Jewish Studies Colloquium, which offered a comparative reading of the notion of ‘drive’ in Freud and in the Talmud. As a visiting researcher he will have access to the numerous literary archives of the city of Arthur Schnitzler and Bertha Pappenheimer, and connect the literary material to the authentic urban streets and neighborhoods of today. Dr. Wilhelm Hemecker (Vienna) and Dr. Brigitte Spreitzer (Graz) will offer their expertise from decades of scholarship in the field to support Joscha in his research and act as his local advisors.