Visiting researcher Ido Fuchs

We are delighted to welcome visiting researcher Ido Fuchs. Ido is a Ph.D. candidate in the Program for Comparative Literature at Tel Aviv University. He is also an Associated EUME Doctoral Fellow at the Berlin Forum Transregionale Studien. Until June he will be staying as a visiting researcher at Utrecht University Network for Environmental Humanities. His research examines the radical lingual, social, and political potentialities of poetics in Palestinian cultural production.

Ido’s first project, Writing Returns, is a critical and comparative study of the poetics of return in Palestinian literature, focusing on questions of gender, anti/post-colonialism, and world literature. Analyzing a multilingual, translocal, and genre-varied corpus, the project provides a nuanced understanding of the myriad ways in which Palestinians perceive and formulate return. Ultimately, the project argues that the poetics of return, with its radical potentialities and ability to connect yet still hold critical differences, offers a valuable framework for fostering communities – local and trans-local, across time and languages, in Palestinian literature and beyond.

Ido’s second project, tentatively titled The Atmosphere of Doomsday, brings together research on colonialism, violence, apocalyptic discourses, and contemporary cultural production in Palestine/Israel. By analyzing cultural production in a broad sense—such as plastic art, literature, popular music, protests, and scholarly work—the project demonstrates that while apocalyptic discourses are indeed utilized to advance systemic violence, the poetics of disaster offers a generative tool for thinking of resistance to this violence and, thus, a future.

His works, deriving from both projects, have appeared or are forthcoming in journals such as Interventions, Biography, Theoretical Practice, Mafte’akh, and Bezalel.