Words of welcome

• Cécile Cottenet (Aix-Marseille Université)
• Corinna Norrick-Rühl (English Department, Chair of Book Studies)
• Anna Ferrando

Room: Deutsches Literaturarchiv

Searching for and Promoting Talent Across Borders: Scouts and Their Overlap With Agents

• Anna Kinder

Room: Deutsches Literaturarchiv Scouts, like agents, are among the intermediaries and “gatekeepers” in the international literary and publishing industry, each of whom now performs a clearly defined role. However, a look at the immediate postwar period reveals that, before and during the period in which these socio-economic functions were ultimately given clear definition, the division of tasks was often blurred and overlapped with those of other roles. The function of scouting, for example, was also fulfilled by literary critics, editors, agents, translators, authors, and readers recruited from among the personal acquaintances of publishing house employees. This makes classification and reconstruction based on publishing archives correspondingly difficult. Drawing on traces found in publishing archives at the German Literature Archive in Marbach, this paper presents case studies, taken from the mid-1950s onwards, that exemplify the differentiation of the roles of scouts and agents. **Speaker Bio:** Anna Kinder, head of the research department at the German Literature Archive (DLA), studied German Studies and Political Science in Munich and Heidelberg, PhD in German Studies from Heidelberg University. Research interests: 20th century literature, Rainer Maria Rilke and Thomas Mann, publisher’s archives, sociology of literature. Publications: Rilke als Gärtner. Berlin: Insel Verlag 2025 (with S. Richter); Verlagsarchive und Digitalisierung. In: Handbuch Verlag. Hg. v. A. Nebrig, C. Norrick-Rühl, E. Thomalla. Berlin, Heidelberg 2025 (with G. Eschenbach, S. Richter, K. Schmidgall, E. Gius, N. Reiter) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-67725-4_30-1; Forschungsgeschichte. In: Zauberberg-Handbuch. Hg. v. Antje Detken, Tom Kindt u. Kai Sina. Stuttgart 2025, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-476-05987-1_33; Verlagsarchive im Deutschen Literaturarchiv. Sammeln und Forschen. Marbach am Neckar 2024 (with J. Bürger, G. Eschenbach, H. Mojem und S. Richter).

Middlemen

• Cécile Cottenet (Aix-Marseille Université)
• Laura McGrath (Temple University)

Room: Deutsches Literaturarchiv Middlemen rewrites literary history from the perspective of one of its most important but least visible figures: the literary agent. Chronicling the story of agents in the United States from the 1950s to today, Laura McGrath uncovers their critical role in the making of American literature. From the famed three-martini lunch to the Frankfurt Book Fair, Middlemen takes readers behind the scenes to show how agents influence what we read. Weaving together original archival research, data analysis, and interviews with scores of agents and other publishing professionals, Middlemen demonstrates that agents—eighty percent of whom are in fact women—are much more than “middlemen.” As intermediaries between author and publisher, agents act as advocates, matchmakers, negotiators, and tastemakers, and they must balance artistic values with the commercial imperatives of publishing conglomerates. In this talk, McGrath will show how the decisions that US agents make about what books to figuratively export, and the strategies that they use to sell an author’s work internationally, have led to the shape of American fiction abroad and the development of the Great American Novel. **Speaker Bio** Laura B. McGrath is Assistant Professor of English at Temple University and author of *Middlemen: Literary Agents and the Making of American Literature* (Princeton UP, 2026). Situated at the intersection of literary sociology, book history, and digital humanities, her research has appeared in venues such as *New Literary History* and *American Literary History*, as well as popular outlets such as *The Atlantic, The Nation*, the *Los Angeles Review of Books* and *Public Books*. Her work has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Stanford University Literary Lab, the Smithsonian Institute of American History, and the New York Public Library. She is the recipient of the 1921 Prize in American Literature.

Literary agenting in Germany: a conversation with Karin Graf, founder of Graf & Graf, and Heinke Hager, CEO of Graf & Graf

• Corinna Norrick-Rühl (English Department, Chair of Book Studies)
• Heinke Hager (Agentur Graf & Graf)
• Karin Graf (Agentur Graf & Graf)

Room: Deutsches Literaturarchiv Founded in 1995 by Karin Graf in Berlin, the literary agency Graf & Graf is one of the leading agencies in the German-speaking world. Graf & Graf’s im pressive client list contains about 300 writers, many of them award-winning, as well as bestselling novelists and upcoming writers. In conversation with Corinna Norrick-Rühl, Karin Graf and Heinke Hager, CEO for 15 years, share insights from the history of the agency and their work, highlighting the important intermediary function of literary agents in a book industry that is increasingly under pressure in the attention economy and explaining the structure and organization of their agency with eight co-workers.

Conclusions and plans for publication & further networking

• Corinna Norrick-Rühl (English Department, Chair of Book Studies)

Room: Deutsches Literaturarchiv