Research Interests

Museum narratives and experience; Relations between literature and historiography/history; poetics and narratology of historical writing; representations of war and Holocaust; contemporary historical narrative in museums, historiography, literature, and film; human rights research; theory and history of poetry, theories of subjectivity. German and British Romanticism;, European Modernism; literary and cultural theory (particularly narratology, theory of aesthetic response, hermeneutics, poststructuralism, discourse theory, performance theory, cultural memory, cognitive theory)
(List of Publications).

Current Research Projects

• My current research concentrates on further development of the concept of “experientiality” for the analysis of museums, as developed in my 2020 monograph The Second World War in the Twenty-First-Century Museum: From Memory, Narrative, and Experience to Experientiality. All of these projects will lead to book articles and journal chapters.

1. I analyze the relationship between war/violence, fiction and children installations in historical museums, focusing on the immersion techniques in such museums to create different historical individual and collective perspectives for museum visitors.
2. Following my brief chapter “Art in Second World War Museums” in The Second World War in the Twenty-First-Century Museum , I focus more systematically on the potential of art in war and history museums and its potential for creating forms of historical immersion and self-reflexivity.
3. A larger long-term study pursues a qualitative visitor analysis of war simulations in contemporary museum exhibitions in order to understand the frames to which the majority of visitors of an institution react. This blending of empirical visitor studies and experientiality is aimed to provide insight into how active a visitor can be, if and when a visitor feels lost in too many choices, and how much guidance, narrative, and structure in an exhibition is needed. It also assesses the impact of cultural memory on the experience and interpretation of exhibits.
4. After demonstrating the relevance of the concept of ‘experientiality’ for the representation of the Second World War including a specialized chapter on “The Holocaust and Perpetration in War Museums,” I will further analyze whether experientiality can be useful concept to understand the representational potential of exhibitions in Holocaust (Memorial) Museums.
5. I will expand my studies on experiential, cultural memory and the Second World War by analyzing the narrative, representational, and aesthetic means of newest Second World War Exhibitions such as the new National Museum of the United States Army, expansions of existing museums such as in the National WWII Museum in New Orleans, and complete redevelopments such as in the Imperial War Museum in London.

Other Current Research

• Establishment of new book series “Museums and Narrative” (edited together with Kerstin Barndt, University of Michigan) with De Gruyter. This series approaches the museum as a narrative medium from literary, memory, media, historiographical, anthropological, and cultural studies perspectives. It invites manuscripts that examine how museums and exhibitions devoted to historical subject matter, heritage and memorial sites, as well as museums of ideas and utopias (institutions that engage in story-making and representations of the past, present, and future) represent temporal structures and processes.
  Call for manuscripts for new scholarly book series: https://blog.degruyter.com/call-for-manuscripts-museums-and-narrative/ (pdf file of CfM).
• Co-organization (together with Natalie Eppelsheimer) of GSA-Seminar “ Holocaust Tourism Revisited: Holocaust Memorial Culture between Education, Tourism, and Commemoration, ” at the GSA (German Studies Association) Annual Conference 2020, Washington, D.C, Oct. 1-4, 2020
• Smaller projects include articles on “Temporal concepts and perspective in literary and historiographical representation of history,” “Museum, war, and migration,” and “Forms of memory and forgetting in contemporary historiographical and literary representations.”

Most Recently Completed Research

The Second World War in the Twenty-First-Century Museum: From Memory, Narrative, and Experience to Experientiality. Media and Cultural Memory 26. Berlin / Boston: De Gruyter, 2020. 368 pp. (xiv+354).
-Abstract & ToC in English (as PDF file)
-Prologue (as PDF file)
-Introduction (chapter 1, as PDF file)
-Link to Open Access EBook as EPUB
-Link to Open Access EBook as PDF
-Link to book on www.amazon.com
-Link to book on www.amazon.de
See also https://blog.degruyter.com/world-war-ii-museums-and-the-battle-for-memory-75-years-later/

Romanhaftes Erzählen von Geschichte: Vergegenwärtigte Vergangenheiten im beginnenden 21. Jahrhundert (Novelistic Narration of History: Pasts Present in the Early 21st Century). Ed. Daniel Fulda and Stephan Jaeger in collaboration with Elena Agazzi. Studien und Texte zur Sozialgeschichte der Literatur 148. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2019. 519 pp. ( vii + 502 pp.).
-Table of Contents (as PDF file)
-Link to book on www.amazon.de

Views of Violence: Representing the Second World War in German and European Museums and Memorials. Ed. Jörg Echternkamp and Stephan Jaeger. Spektrum: Publications from the German Studies Association 19, New York: Berghahn Books, 2019. 283 pages.
-Table of Contents
-Introduction (as PDF file)
-Link to book on www.amazon.com

 

Archive

Aufsatz (article) "Zwischen Tragik und Heldentum: Die Inszenierung westdeutscher Vergangenheit in Ilona Zioks Dokumentarfilm Fritz Bauer: Tod auf Raten (2010)" (© Stephan Jaeger)
- published as “Zwischen Tragik und Heldentum: Die Inszenierung westdeutscher Vergangenheit in Ilona Zioks Dokumentarfilm Fritz Bauer: Tod auf Raten (2010).” Forschungsjournal Soziale Bewegungen: Analysen zu Demokratie und Zivilgesellschaft, special issue Menschenrechtsbewegung in Deutschland: Wie weit reicht der politische Einfluss? 28.4 (2015): 319-337.
Revised German version (written/translated by author) of Stephan Jaeger. "Between Tragedy and Heroism: Staging the West German Past in Ilona Ziok’s Fritz Bauer: Tod auf Raten (2010)" Special issue Screening German Perpetration, Colloquia Germanica 43.3 (2010 [published June 2013]), ed. Brad Prager und Michael D. Richardson: 195-213.
=> pdf file of English published text

List of Publications