Gaby Pailer & Florian Gassner Awarded $200,000 SSHRC Insight Grant

SSHRC Insight Grant: “Epistolary Cultures circa 1800”
Gaby Pailer and Florian Gassner were successful in applying for a SSHRC Insight Grant dedicated to the topic “Epistolary Cultures circa 1800: The Letters of Charlotte Schiller (1766-1826)” in collaboration with Franziska Schößler (University of Trier). The amount of the award is $200,000 for a 5-year period. The research objectives are two-fold. The main goal is a hybrid edition of Charlotte Schiller’s complete correspondence (5000 letters; 2000 from her; 3000 to her), which forms a remarkable example of (trans-)cultural communication in the late 18th and early 19th century, bearing witness of the political, social, cultural and intellectual history of the day. This edition forms the third component of a larger publication project Gaby Pailer had underway since 2007, supported by various funding agencies in Canada and Germany. The first two components are a monograph (G. Pailer: “Charlotte Schiller. Leben und Schreiben im klassischen Weimar”, Darmstadt: WBG 2009) and a work edition (G.Pailer, Andrea Dahlmann-Resing and Melanie Kage, eds., “Charlotte Schiller: Literarische Schriften”, Darmstadt: WBG, forthcoming in fall 2014). The new editorial project is  combined with a study abroad opportunity for a small group of undergraduate students (University of Trier and Goethe-und Schiller-Archiv Weimar) and includes graduate student employment and training at UBC and abroad. Concurrently, we will work to develop a new UBC course focusing on “Epistolary Cultures” from a theoretical angle of literary studies, digital humanities, and media studies.