Sarah Ritt

Sarah Ritt is a doctoral candidate at the chair of Public History at the University of Vienna. She received her MA from the Department of English and American Studies at the University of Vienna, where she specialized in Irish Studies. Parallel to working on her dissertation, she works as a translator and editor for German and English.

Research interests: Public History, Irish Studies, Modernism, Oral History, Contemporary History, Critical Discourse Studies, Memory Studies, Linguistic Landscape Studies

Current research project:
What happens when two communities with opposite values and identities share a city, not only in their everyday lives, but also in their remembrance rituals and discursive practices?
This project will seek answers to this question in the case of the Northern Irish capital of Belfast. Ther city has remained a hotspot of ideological tensions, even though the civil war has formally ended in 1998. Brexit – the departure of the United Kingdom from the European Union – has once again raised the question of what it means to be Northern Irish in the 21st century and how the troubled past of the area should be represented and remembered.

Parades and regular demonstrations are the most prevalent form of civic participation in the city, often those happenings have ties to distinct groups, ranging from cultural initiatives to sports fans and – unfortunately, even to this day – paramilitaries. Those are all based on a mixture of religious holidays, political occasions or as reactions to current socio-political events.

By using a mix of empirical methods (Linguistic/semiotic analysis as well as participatory observation) from both actual parades as well as relevant stops along their routes, an insight into contemporary remembrance culture will be given, exploring how participants, audiences and even outsiders (f.e. tourists) create and consume those identity-building narratives.

Publications:

with Jan Luttenberger: »Gottheit wäre mir sonst zu einfach« Narrative Genres als Rahmen für Positionierungspraxen am Beispiel eines Computerspiel-Internetforums. Wiener Linguistische Gazette Themenheft 81/2017, Soziale Positionierung als Praxis und Praktik.
Unification, Nationalism and/or Brexit? The impact of the Nationalisms and the Northern Irish Good Friday Agreement 1998–2018 on local media discourse Colloquium: New Philologies: Volume 3, Issue 2 191-194.
Wanderings of an Irish Drunkard? Alcohol and Self-Staging in Brendan Behan’s Confessions of an Irish Rebel Booze as a Muse: Literary and Cultural Studies of Drink: Austrian Studies in English 106 157-173.