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Visiting Professorship

"Feminist Futures" is the name of the visiting professorship funded by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) and Marburg University at the Center for Gender Studies and Feminist Futurology, starting in the winter semester 2026/27. It aims to internationalize the research-oriented and transfer-focused education of our students.

The visiting professors are internationally renowned scholars who work from different disciplinary perspectives on the central future challenges of the 21st century: the defense and strengthening of democracy and the rule of law; developments in digitality, particularly artificial intelligence (AI); and ecological transformation. They analyze these challenges in their international, intersectional, and interdisciplinary entanglements. By bringing their expertise into the classroom, the visiting professors support students of the BA minor in Gender Studies - as well as students with a gender focus in other programs - in acquiring future-relevant knowledge and analytical skills needed for a gender-sensitive and forward-looking engagement with the challenges of our time.

Would you like to become a visiting professor on the 'Feminist Futures' programme? If so, please to present your ideas. Visiting professors must conduct three courses per term (two for Bachelor's students and one for Master's students), deliver a public lecture (e.g. the renowned annual Gender Lecture organised by the Center for Gender Studies) and participate in a research workshop at the Center for Gender Studies. The appointment can be for a period of between 3 and 12 months.

Visiting Professors

  • Winter Semester 2026/27: Dr. Cyrine Kortas

    Cyrine Kortas holds a PhD in English and Comparative Literature from the University of Sousse. Her research interests include feminist studies, masculine studies, gender, Sufism, media studies, and pedagogy. She is affiliated with the University of Gabes, Tunisia, where she teaches English literature, including Elizabethan drama, Modern American Fiction, Transcendentalist Poetry, and Eco-Poetry. She was formerly the coordinator of the Master's Programme in English for Media Studies and Journalism. Her co-publication Cultural Cinematics and Bollywood grew out of her coordination of this MA programme. She is now Head of the English Department, in which capacity she has organized various events, including international conferences.

    She is a former long-term fellow at MECAM, the Merian Centre for Advanced Studies in the Maghreb, Tunis University. Her project at MECAM deals with representations of the New Man, with a special focus on the male body, in a selection of English and Maghrebi texts, drawing on Sufi aesthetics of the Perfect Man. She published a MECAM paper entitled "The (In)Visibility of Female Saints in Tunisian Sufi Literature". She is also affiliated with LAD, a research unit at the University of Sfax, Tunisia. Among her publications with this research unit is "'The Woman Who Rode Away': A Transitivity Reading that Matches the Sufi Understanding of the Circles of the Inner Self's Journey in Time and Space".

    Both her teaching and research engage with questions of gender dynamics and aesthetics in a comparative reading of English/American and Maghrebi literatures. By joining the Center for Gender Studies and Feminist Futurology, she seeks to introduce a different academic culture and support students in developing future-oriented knowledge and analytical skills to address the challenges of the 21st century through the lens of gender.

  • Teaching by Dr. Cyrine Kortas, Winter Semester 2026/27

    Gender and Literature: Past and Present: A Comparative Reading of English and Maghrebi Texts

    Course Description: It is a one-semester class that adopts a transregional approach to the study of gender and literature between two shores: England and the Maghreb. It moves historically from pre-modern and early modern configurations of gender in diverse literary genres and texts to modernist and contemporary writings. The course asks how gendered identities are imagined in relation to themes such as travel, exile, embodiment, alienation, power and empowerment, and subjectivity. It also explores how artistic creativity and adept participate in these imaginings. 

    The class is based on the students’ research and discussion of selected texts and theories.  A research paper is requested by the end of the course, linking course themes to a broader question in comparative literature and culture studies. 

    Questions of Women and Islam in the 20th century North African Fiction

    Course Description: It is a one-semester course that aims to initiate students into matters of gender in North African literature. It seeks to investigate concerns such as, but not limited to, the woman question, national identity, new masculinities, and past and present gender representations. By focusing on a selection of texts from Egypt, Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco, the course aims to introduce the students to different literary genres, traditions, and gender understandings. 

    Women's social realities and Gender Studies in Third World Cinema

    Course Description: It is a one-semester class that examines how women, gender, and sexuality are represented and contested in Third-World Cinemas, namely but not limited to: Africa, Asia, and Latin America) during a period extending roughly from the 1950s to today. Combining feminist theories, postcolonial readings, and cinema studies, a close study of these texts will provide the students with a clearer idea of the gender paradigm in this part of the globe. In other words, it reads how gender intersects with nationalism, decolonisation, migration, religion, and class to shape both on-screen representations and social realities defining women’s presence.