Successful defence of Rebecka Dürr’s dissertation ‘Oral Interpretation in Live Poetry: Reading, Slam and Rap’

23 October 2025

Photo: PoetryDA

On October 16, 2025, Rebecka Dürr defended her German studies dissertation Zur sprechkünstlerischen Gestaltung von Live-Lyrik. Lesung, Slam und Rap [Live Poetry as Verbal Art: Reading, Slam and Rap].

It was supervised by Prof. Claudia Benthien, with speech communication scholar Prof. Kati Hannken-Illjes from Marburg University acting as the second supervisor. Linguist Prof. Wolfgang Imo from the Institute of German Studies served on the dissertation committee as well.

We would like to extend our warm congratulations to Rebecka for the successful completion of her doctorate.

From 2021 to 2024, Rebecka was a research associate, together with Kira Henkel, in Sub-Project 2, “Music(alization) and the Lyric: Recent Medial Correaltions,” led by Vadim Keylin.

Her doctoral thesis addresses an important desideratum within research on orally performed poetry: it develops an expanded set of tools for examining and describing three most prominent live poetry formats – poetry reading, slam and rap – in terms of their speech styles. Its innovative methodological framework combines speech communication research on oral interpretation with approaches from theater, literary, and cultural studies.

Her dissertation considers both classical poetry readings and less formal spoken-word formats, as well as the musical realizations of poetry in rap. This interdisciplinary dissertation focuses on the artistic use of voice, rhythm, bodies, and performance in oral presentation of poetic texts, which oscillates between rehearsed and spontaneous. The study aims to gain fundamental insights into the style and individual elements of the spoken word presentation of poetry, highlighting both the similarities between the three formats and differences in the structure of performance and oral interpretation.

The study will be published next year in our book series Poetry in the Digital Age by De Gruyter.