Marie Heim-Vögtlin Prize 2016: The ghosts of Zoë Lehmann Imfeld

Zoë Lehmann Imfeld, a researcher at the University of Bern, has been awarded the 2016 Marie Heim-Vögtlin Prize for her remarkable doctoral thesis on ghosts and the Gothic in Victorian literature, which spans the disciplines of literature, philosophy and theology. The prize will be awarded on 21 June 2016 at the Swiss National Science Foundation. Zoë Lehmann Imfeld, who is the mother of two young children, received SNSF funding for the second part of her doctorate. Her thesis proposes a fresh interpretation of ghost stories, a very popular genre in late 19th-century English literature. By applying theological and philosophical concepts to the interpretation of literary work, this very original piece of research challenges the separation made between literature and religion, disciplines that are traditionally regarded as independent of one another. It thus opens the way for a new research paradigm. Her thesis, which she defended with distinction in early 2015, will be published by the prestigious English-language house of Palgrave Macmillan this year.