Anna-Lena Eick

Anna-Lena Eick is a FWO Senior Postdoctoral Fellow at the Centre for Literary and Intermedial Crossings (CLIC) at Vrije Universiteit Brussel and affiliated with the Department of General and Comparative Literature at Gutenberg Institute for World Literature and Written Media at the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz. 

Her current research project, Postdigital Poetics in Contemporary Print Fiction examines how contemporary print novels (2015–present) engage with the postdigital mediascape through innovative formal-aesthetic reconfigurations of traditional narrative structures and heightened media-reflexivity. Mapping the emergence of what the study terms Postdigital Poetics, it analyses how print fiction imitates or transposes digital mediality and formats and how such narrative and intermedial strategies operate within the medial constraints and affordances of print. The project has been awarded a Senior Postdoctoral Fellowship from the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO) for the period 2026–2029.

Anna-Lena holds a PhD in Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies from Justus Liebig University Gießen, Germany. Her doctoral thesis engaged with the co-evolution of visual media (such as photography and early film) and the critical re-orientation of postmodern historical novels from the 1960s onwards. A revised version, Geschichte zerfällt in Bilder, nicht in Geschichten‘ – Visualität in der literarischen Geschichtsdarstellung,was published in 2024 with Brill in the Inter/Media series. 

Anna-Lena Eick held research and teaching positions at the University of Augsburg, Justus Liebig University Gießen and Johannes Gutenberg-University Mainz, as well as at Østfold University College. She was a Visiting Research Fellow at the CRC Home/s at the University of Heidelberg from 2025–2026, a Visiting Scholar at Université de Picardie Jules Vernes in 2026 and at Vrije Universiteit Brussel (CLIC) in 2025. Anna-Lena is an active member of the Frankfurt Memory Studies Platform (FMSP), the German Comparative Literature Association (DGAVL) and she recently co-founded the Postdigital Narratives Network. Her research interests include narratology, inter- and transmediality studies, digital culture,  as well as transcultural studies and the postmigrant paradigm.