Victoria Pöhls

Victoria Pöhls is a Postdoctoral Researcher on the project. Victoria has a background in philosophy, linguistics, literary studies (Master’s from University of Hamburg) and cognitive science (Master’s from UCD), which reflects her interest in studying narratives and their impact on audiences using both hermeneutic and empirical methods. To foster interdisciplinary collaboration at the frontiers of these disciplines, she co-founded the Powerful-Literary-Fiction-Texts-Network in 2019 and published the edited collection Powerful Prose. How Textual Features Impact Readers (2021). As a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics, she focused on narratives’ (alleged) potential to counteract stereotypical expectancies about refugees. Since then, she has been working at the Lit Lab of TU Darmstadt, a laboratory that studies reading experiences with eye-tracking and psychophysiological measures (e.g., EDA, EEG, facial EMG).