HS-Prof. Mag. Dr. Carmen Sippl, MA

Biography

HS-Prof. Mag. Dr. Carmen Sippl has dedicated her research to the cultural dialogue. She regards literatures and languages as humankind’s most powerful media for open-mindedness, empathy, and peace.

She is Head of Centre Futures Literacy at the University College of Teacher Education Lower Austria, and associate lecturer at the Faculty of Philological and Cultural Studies of University of Vienna. As a philologist, she has found an intellectual home in Environmental Huma­nities, using the concept of the Anthropocene as an impulse-giving framework of thought for science communica­tion and transformative education. As a professor for cultural semiotics and plurilingualism, her main teaching area in teacher education is cultural education, with a special focus on childrens’ literature and the nearly limit­less possibilities it offers for multiliteracies education.

Her research focuses on the interrelations and entanglements of humankind and nature as reflected in literary pro­cesses and linguistic expressions, in narratives and visualizations. Working with contemporary writers and illustra­tors as well as with archival materials, she studies the concepts of nature negotiated in literature as a cultural prac­tice in past and present, to gain insight into the ways cultural sustainability for possible futures can be redesigned by literatures and languages as ecological forces within culture.

Carmen Sippl is not only a profound researcher and university lecturer, but has a long-time experience as a lite­rary mediator, having worked for many years as an editor and publishing director in German and Austrian publi­shing houses. She holds degrees from the University of Würzburg (Master of Arts, PhD in English and Slavic Philo­logies), was awarded a prize for her dissertation on Russian travel literature, and has received scholarships in excellency programmes.

She is the author of books on translations as a medium of the cultural dialogue, on cultural sustainability in the Anthropocene, of many papers in her fields of research on the literature pedagogy, cultural ecology, inter-/transculturality, of book reviews and teaching materials, and is writing her own blog. Cultural Sustainability in Education is her vision for learning and teaching Futures Literacy in the Anthropocene. Since 2024, she is chairholder of the UNESCO Chair in Learning and Teaching Futures Literacy in the Anthropocene.

Research priorities

Anthropocene & literature, cultural ecology & literature pedagogy, futures literacy & artistic research, academic writing

Publications

Publications