Managing Director FELICITAS LOEST

Felicitas has been a part of CAPAS since the very beginning. Starting in 2019, she coordinated the application process for the Käte Hamburger Centre and assumed the role of managing director after its approval in 2020. She played a central role in the establishment and development of the Centre, coordinating its various work areas ever since. She is also a founding member of the editorial board of both the Centre’s peer-reviewed journal, Apocalyptica, and its book series, Apocalyptic and Post-Apocalyptic Studies. Before taking on her various responsibilities at CAPAS, Felicitas worked at the Department for Romance Studies of Heidelberg University, where she taught in the areas of Hispanic Literature and Cultural Studies, coordinated projects for international academic exchange, and served as coordinator for cultural studies for a year. 

Building on her studies in German and Spanish literature, cultural studies, as well as European art history at Heidelberg University and at King’s College London, Felicitas is writing a PhD thesis in Latin American Studies. Her research interests concern conceptions of identity and the subject in relation to landscape, drawing on art history and critical geography for the analysis of literature, and informed by approaches in de- and postcolonial theory, as well as gender studies perspectives. This approach is grounded in her experience of growing up in a small city in the Atacama desert, located between the Andes and the Pacific Ocean as orienting landmarks. For her research project, she received two scholarships: a BWS-plus research fellowship at the University of Chile, and a Fulbright Doctoral Fellowship at Yale University, which was cancelled due to the pandemic in 2020. At the moment, she is an affiliated researcher at the Department of Interdisciplinary and Multiscalar Studies at the University of Regensburg.