Residing in Berlin as part of the Einstein/BUA Oxford Visiting Fellow Program, Evangelista has set out to understand how ideas of literary cosmopolitanism and world literature developed in the German capital in the early twentieth century. To these ends, Evangelista has established, together with Prof. Gesa Stedman of Humboldt-Universität’s Centre for British Studies, a research group which regularly hosts workshops and events while strengthening the collaboration between Oxford and the Berlin University Alliance under the umbrella of the Oxford-Berlin Research Partnership.

Evangelista has a longstanding relationship with Berlin’s research landscape: “I have been coming to Berlin regularly since I was a doctoral student in Oxford in the early 2000s,” the Oxford scholar recounts, “back then, I was researching the legacy of German aesthetics and philology of nineteenth-century English literature.” Ever since, his interests have constantly evolved, but continue to address the relationships between different languages and literatures. In 2021, Evangelista worked together with Stedman to curate an exhibition on British authors in Berlin in the 1920s and 1930s, which was featured in venues across both Berlin and Oxford. Currently, in the context of his Einstein/BUA Fellowship, Evangelista has taken more of a theoretical turn to explore the historical development of notions of world literature and literary cosmopolitanism, with a particular focus on who and what tend to be marginalized in the construction of such concepts.

This type of research serves, according to Evangelista, “to put under critical pressure the sense of naive optimism that is often attached to the idea of cosmopolitanism.” How world literature and cosmopolitanism accommodate gender, race, disability, and sexual orientation, as well as the role of marginalized subjects like migrants and refugees, are questions which receive special attention in his current research, with a focus on how they operate (and have operated in the past) within the specific literary space of the city of Berlin.

Evangelista and Stedman have hosted several events to date to explore these questions, inviting not only scholars from Berlin, Oxford, and across Europe, but also young writers and artists with migration backgrounds, who provide nuanced insights into, in Evangelista’s own words, “the mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion that underpin the use of the English language in Berlin today.” One of their workshops explored the role of the periodical press as a vehicle for the circulation of literary translations and ideas of world citizenship from the 1870s to the 1930s. Another focused on the late nineteenth-century concept of ‘world city’ in relation to Berlin, paying particular attention to different experiences of urban modernity and the multiplication of international literary exchanges during that period. The project team is currently editing two special issues of academic journals based on these workshops that they held in the Centre for British Studies in 2024 and 2025 respectively.

The next major milestone of the project will be the summer school collaboration with the Harvard Institute for World Literature, hosted by Humbolt-Universität in June and July of 2026, which, as Evangelista explains, “brings graduate students from all over the world together with leading academics in the fields of comparative literature, world literature and translation studies.” The summer school applications are open from November 1, 2025 until February 1, 2026, with ten spaces to be allocated to students from Oxford and across the Berlin University Alliance at no cost.

Berlin as a research destination is itself an important factor in Evangelista’s research: “Starting an academic collaboration in Berlin enables you to reach extraordinarily interesting and diverse networks both within academia and in the arts world,” he explained. With plenty of art galleries and personal favorites such as Café Zwiebelfisch on Savignyplatz, or Café Fleury and Lass Uns Freunde Bleiben in Mitte and Prenzlauer Berg, the Einstein/BUA Fellow has no shortage of spots to read, work away from a computer screen, and observe the cosmopolis of Berlin in action.