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Peter Zusi discusses his vision for FRINGE
Who are you and what do you do?
I am Lecturer on Czech with Slovak Studies at UCL SSEES. I work on Central European culture and comparative literature with a particular interest in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century literature. I am currently finishing a book about Franz Kafka and Czech modernism.
What is FRINGE?
The UCL FRINGE Centre seeks novel ways to describe and analyse how complexity, ambivalence, and immeasurability shape social and cultural phenomena. Our activities are inherently multi- and cross-disciplinary, and for this reason one of our main bases is the UCL Institute of Advanced Studies. We are also interested in how apparently abstract qualities operate in particular situations in the real world, and this links us with the efforts to re-think critical Area Studies currently underway not only at the UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies, where we were initially established, but indeed across the globe.
The FRINGE Centre is the brainchild of Prof. Alena Ledeneva (UCL SSEES). In our first few years we have established a wide network of collaborators, an impressive track record of conferences and events, and solid funding support. We have also launched the FRINGE Series with the UCL Press, focussed on edited volumes that address ‘FRINGE-y’ topics and that support a particular format, favouring shorter but more numerous contributions so as to explore as many different facets of a topic as possible.
What is your vision for FRINGE this year? In the coming years my aim is to increase the international reach of the FRINGE Centre by fostering and furthering collaboration with relevant institutions across Europe, the U.S., and Asia. We will continue to seek new sources of funding to expand our activities. And I also hope to broaden the impact of the FRINGE Series through seeking out or commissioning volumes addressing not only the practice but the theory of cross-disciplinary work and critical Area Studies. The aim is to have the series not simply produce exceptional individual volumes, but to stand for a particular mode of inquiry that will inspire a broader academic audience.