Cultural Sociology and Literature

I research and write about culture in scholarly communication in the humanities or contemporary literary production.

In some earlier projects, I look at how scholars communicate and how, by means of this communication, scholarship impacts society, or how societal developments impact scholarly communication. I’m particularly interested in the humanities since what it means to being human and the constitution of Western societies is intricately intertwined with the thought and tradition of the Geisteswissenschaften. For these projects, I combine aspects of contemporary practice theory with cultural sociology (Yale Sociology’s strong programme).

I also look at processes of gatekeeping in contemporary literary production. Literature is said to be one of the fundamental cultural products of Western societies, but knowledge about how it is produced vis-a-vis existing culture structures tends to be scarce. Cultural products not only influence culture, they are influenced by culture just as well. How so, and how the decision-making of agents, editors, and critics reflects this, is the concern of my research.

I finished my PhD at University College London with the doctoral dissertation: Rationalities of Scholarly Discourse: A Cultural Sociological Analysis of Authorship and Publishing in the Humanities in July 2021.

I currently work as a researcher at the DZHW (German Centre for Higher Education Research and Science Studies), Berlin, after having finished a research stay at the Department of Sociology at Yale University.

I’m currently funded by the German Research Ministry (BMBF). My work former work was funded and supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, UK, through the London Arts and Humanities Partnership, and the German Academic Scholarship Foundation (Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes). Find out more about me and my work here.

I’m a member of the German Sociological Association (Deutschen Gesellschaft für Soziologie), the European Sociological Association, and the Society for Social Studies of Science.

Reach out: marcel.knochelmann.15[at]ucl.ac.uk