Annette Gilbert is a literary scholar who, after holding positions at universities in Siberia, Moscow, Göttingen, Berlin, Bielefeld, Boulder/Colorado and Mainz, is currently Academic Director at the Department of German and Comparative Literature at Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg.
She is particularly interested in the mediality and materiality of literature, as well as its social and (infra)structural conditions. The focus is on avant-garde and experimental literature and art. Further research interests include concepts of work and authorship, the cultural techniques of reading and writing, the media of literature, and changes in publication and distribution practices in the post-digital age. This involves questions of publicity, circulation, censorship, subversion, underground, samizdat, copyright and access.
Gilbert received her doctorate in scriptural literature and art from the Freie Universität Berlin under Carlfriedrich Claus and Cy Twombly. Her habilitation thesis, “Im toten Winkel der Literatur. Grenzfälle literarischer Werkwerdung seit den 1950er Jahren” (“In the Blind Spot of Literature: Borderline Cases of Literary Creation since the 1950s”), was written as part of a Dilthey Fellowship from the Volkswagen Foundation. She currently heads the network “Das Wissen der digitalen Literatur” (“The Knowledge of Digital Literature”) of the German Research Foundation and is Principal Investigator (PI) in the German Research Foundation’s Graduate School “Literature and Public Sphere in Different Contemporary Cultures”. After completing her research project “Library of Artistic Print on Demand. Post-Digital Publishing in Times of Platform Capitalism”, which she presented in exhibitions at the German National Library in Leipzig and the Villa Stuck (Munich), she is now working on the student pirate printing movement of the 1968 era. In this context, she also initiated the inter-university oral history teaching project “Black Market for Red Books”. Previous teaching projects led to a Wikipedia edit-a-thon and the travelling exhibition “Reading with all the senses. Wheelchair accessible access to literature”.