Katrin Dautel (German and Literary Studies) has specialized on island literature and constructions of insularity. She analyses 20th- and 21st-century European literature with a special focus on German-language texts. Since pacific islands can be considered as a paradigmatic site of insularity in the Western imaginary, her main focus lies on the analysis of ‘remote’ islands in literature, mainly located in the Pacific, but also in the Mediterranean and Canary Islands as geographical areas employed in the European imaginary to evoke other, far-away realities. Dautel’s approach to literature is a space constructivist perspective contextualized in the so-called spatial turn in literary and cultural studies, considering space as a social construct rather than a given entity. At the interface between discursivity and materiality, she employs space-philosophical and anthropological theories to literary texts, seeking to analyze literary island-constructions as an important contributor to established Western island discourses. Within the network, she would focus on island-constructions in literature with an emphasis on the role of language and literature in established discourses about islands and insular spaces as well as alternative notions of insularity subverting traditional Western ideas.