ROUNDTABLE | Collective Reading as Intervention. On Fascism and Alt-Right Literature(s)
WHEN: 10 May 2025 – 4 pm - 5:30 pm
WHERE: Spore Initiative
WITH: Neela Janssen, Andreas Gehrlach and Stephan Zandt
ORGANIZED BY: Sofie Fingado
MODERATED BY: Sophia Doyle
Event Description
As fascism everywhere is on the rise, this roundtable seeks to open a discussion about right-wing, (neo)nazi, and alt-right theories, literatures, movements, and networks that speak to a development of fascism on the rise, and to their very own form of cosmopolitanism. Neela Janssen, Andreas Gehrlach and Stephan Zandt will speak about their experience of being part of a reading group on precisely these topics: from white power novels to founding texts of the Nouvelle Droite, from the conservative revolution to TikTok, from right wing podcasting to ecofascism to christian conservatism. They will share not only what they have learned, read, watched and discussed but also insights about their collective reading practice, and what it has meant to them to read source material – often violent, always problematic – whilst being part of a collective.
Bios of Speakers
Neela Janssen studied Cultural History and Theory at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and at the University of Toronto. Her PhD project on the question of failing men takes on narratives of decay inherent in fiction and their close connection to literary and cultural negotiations of bourgeois masculinity. Since October 2024, she is a junior fellow at ifk in Vienna.
Andreas Gehrlach is the program director of the International Research Center for Cultural Studies (ifk) in Vienna. Since completing his habilitation on the cultural, literary and body history of kneeling, he is now looking forward to tackling new research projects on the political history of swamps or on the cultural technique of getting lost.
Stephan Zandt is a post-doctoral researcher in the DFG Research Training Group Media Anthropology at the Bauhaus-University Weimar. He studied Cultural Studies and Comparative Cultural and Religious Studies. His research interests include media anthropologies, politics of childhood, cultural history and anthropology of the senses, aesthetics and human-animal studies.
