R. L. Victoria Pöhls

Victoria Pöhls is a researcher in the Language & Literature Department at the Max-Planck-Institute for Empirical Aesthetics (Frankfurt am Main). Her interest in studying literature with both hermeneutical and empirical methods evolved during her graduate studies in Cognitive Science (M. A., University College Dublin) and Literature, Linguistics, and Philosophy (M. A., Universität Hamburg). To foster interdisciplinary work at the frontiers of these disciplines, she co-founded the Powerful-Literary-Fiction-Texts-Network in 2019. Her research focuses on comparative, empirical, and cognitive approaches to literature and is especially concerned with the portrayal of marginalized groups. She takes a special interest in developing implicit methods of testing for reader response studies. With Mariane Utudji, she is the editor of the recent collection, Powerful Prose: How Textual Features Impact Readers (Transcript Verlag, 2021).