During my sabbatical leave I hope to focus on three inter-connected research points:  

1. the application for a broader internal research unit (GOA) on cosmopolitan/hegemonic/imperial languages within the wider European sphere of the Middle Ages. This application is planned together with colleagues from the fields of History, Arabic and Greek Studies and wants to draw attention to the particular situation of three of the cosmopolitan languages and literatures in Europe (Arabic, Greek, Latin) and their interactions and dialogues with each other and with the local or vernacular languages and literatures as they developed alongside (and sometimes from) the cosmopolitanism as implied in these three languages.
2. the preparation and application for research funding on a transnational, European level concerning cross-cultural and notably crossliterary approaches of the literary and cultural multisided reality of European Middle Ages. This project is being prepared in collaboration with CMS York and CML Odense-York in the strand Translocations and Transformations, in which several workshops and conferences managed to bring together experts from different cultural fields to collaborate over the borders of traditional academic specialisms. Objective in the end is the application for a broader international collaborative project.
3. the completion of at least one out of several of my own research projects. Having been absorbed by a huge teaching load for the first 9 years of my professional career, followed by 5 years of intensive PhD-supervision (7 PhD’s in 5 years), I never abandoned my own research projects that, however, I did not find the time and rest to publish in the appropriate form of monographs. I want to finish at least a book on the Loire poetics that is more than halfway and that is expected in the field and hope to continue one or two of the others, waiting for conclusion.