معرفی
Tobias Orfgen serves as Research Associate in the Department of German Studies, Modern German Literature I at the University of Siegen's Faculty of German Studies, working under Prof. Dr. Niels Werber since 2025. Previously, he was a Research Assistant in the Collaborative Research Center 1472 'Transformations of the Popular' (2023-2024) and Student/Research Assistant under Prof. Dr. Niels Werber and Dr. Matthias Schaffrick (2015-2023).
His research centers on contemporary German-language literature with focus on aesthetic self-description, examining how works employ terms like 'cute', 'nice', 'crisp' and 'cool' to challenge traditional high/popular culture distinctions. His doctoral project 'Our aesthetic categories' investigates why contemporary literary works appear increasingly ambiguous regarding their attribution to autonomous art systems, analyzing immanent aesthetics rather than applying external normative categories.
Orfgen teaches courses including 'Postdigital - Spellings and constellations in Rudi Nuss Reality is coming', 'Writings of the Anthropocene in Roman Ehrlich's Malé', and upcoming seminars on psychoanalytic concepts in Joshua Groß's work and resistance methods in contemporary German literature through 2026. He has presented research on disruptive chronological structures in Roman Ehrlich's Malé at academic conferences, with another presentation scheduled for October 2025 at Humboldt University of Berlin.
