Bernhard Schirg is currently a Visiting Fellow at Wolfson College, Oxford. He has a PhD in Renaissance Latin and is the leader of the Post-Doc project 'Reaching for Atlantis', for which he won a cross-disciplinary Freigeist Fellowship in 2017. This multimedia initiative will be focussed on the cultural biographies of objects, especially those used by 17th-century Swedish antiquarians to substantiate their theory that Scandinavia had been the origin of classical mythology.
Bernhard began exploring 'southern lives' after a seminal journey to Southern Patagonia. Following the traces of individuals whose relationship with these lands he felt worth retelling in the 21st century, he set up an online writing platform as a side-project, located somewhere in the borderland between text and photography, between academic rigour and visual storytelling.
The homepage toolong-didntread.de (spring 2021) will be dedicated to long reads that take the reader to remote places and the stories behind them, ranging from the far North of Arctic Sweden to the deep South along the shores of Tierra del Fuego and the Strait of Magellan.
In 2021, Bernhard will continue these initiatives at the University of Hamburg, repositioning them as projects in Public History.
