Key Concepts for the Study of Culture. An Introduction. Ed. Vera Nünning, Philipp Löffler, Margit Peterfy (WVT Handbücher zum literatur- und kulturwissenschaftlichen Studium, 22). Trier: WVT, 2020.

• Zeno Ackermann

This contribution to WVT’s prominent series of study aids is presented simultaneously as a “handbook” and as an “introduction”. It addresses “young researchers” who need assistance to “find their feet in a booming and highly promising field of study”. The book, which has emerged from a co-taught lecture at the University of Heidelberg, can be read as responding to the specific situatedness of cultural studies within German departments of Anglophone philology. The authors – Vera Nünning, Philipp Löffler and Margit Peterfy, with Corinna Assmann coming in as a co-author for two of the twelve chapters – usefully integrate American and British studies, but they refrain from addressing other English-speaking cultures. The “study of culture” – significantly, the term ‘cultural studies’ is largely avoided – comes to be presented not as a consolidated discipline but as an open project, a set of morphing dispositions which combines perspectives “ranging from cultural anthropology and cultural psychology to philosophy, sociology and postcolonial theory”.