Tatjana Jesch

Tatjana Jesch is Professor for Modern German Literature and its Didactics at the University of Education Freiburg, where she has held her position since 2010. Her academic career spans multiple German institutions, including teaching appointments at universities in Bremen, Lüneburg, Heidelberg, and Kassel between 1997-2006. She maintains active memberships in numerous scholarly organizations including the German Literary Scholars Association, European Narratology Network, and the Society for Children's and Young Adult Literature Research.

Professor Jesch's research focuses on narratology, psychoanalytic literary studies, fairy tale research, children's and young adult literature, and literary didactics. Her work frequently bridges literary theory with educational practice and cognitive science. She has developed approaches examining how narrative structures function in literary texts and their implications for teaching literature, with particular attention to cognitive processing of texts and multimodal learning approaches.

Her publication record shows a consistent trajectory from early work on fairy tales and children's literature to more recent explorations of global crisis narratives and the intersection of religion and violence in literature. Professor Jesch has demonstrated increasing engagement with interdisciplinary applications of narratology, particularly in narrative medicine and cognitive literary science.

• Awarded by the Vice President for Research at Leuphana University Lüneburg as outstanding scientific presentation
• Co-editor of 'Freiburger literaturpsychologische Gespräche' book series since 2014
• Recipient of DFG scholarship (1993-1996) in the Graduate College for Aesthetic Education at University of Hamburg

Professor Jesch has supervised numerous academic projects and lectures across Germany and Switzerland. She has developed research on narrative comprehension, particularly regarding how students process implicit meanings in texts, and has explored applications of narratology in medical contexts, analyzing patient narratives following brain injuries. Her work with the Freiburg Working Group for Literature and Psychoanalysis provides a collaborative framework for interdisciplinary research at the intersection of literature, psychology, and education.