Researchers
Carolin Duttlinger’s research interests are in modern German literature, thought and visual culture, with a particular focus on modernist and contemporary literature. She has worked on such areas as Weimar photography, on the history and theory of perception, on literature, memory and trauma, and on literature and anthropology. She has published widely on authors such as Franz Kafka, Walter Benjamin, Theodor W. Adorno, Robert Musil, Alfred Döblin, Elias Canetti, Ruth Klüger, Thomas Kling and W.G. Sebald. Her current principal research project explores the dialectical interplay between attention and distraction in twentieth-century German culture.
Carolin Duttlinger is Co-Director of the Oxford Kafka Research Centre and a member of the Executive Board of the International Walter Benjamin Society. She writes regularly for the Times Literary Supplement.
See also her film on Franz Kafka’s novel Der Verschollene (Amerika): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zHHyBy8al3k
Ben Morgan’s main research interests are in German intellectual history (medieval mysticism, Nietzsche, early psychoanalysis, Heidegger, the Frankfurt School); German film (Fritz Lang, Leni Riefenstahl, the ‘Heimat’ film) and comparative literature. He has also worked on contemporary writing (Jelinek, Trojanow). His current projects are an account of the manuscript transmission of the late medieval mystical text ‘The Sister Catherine Treatise’ from the 1310s through to the early 17th-century; and, under the working title ‘Fiction and other minds’, an investigation in collaboration with Naomi Rokotnitz (Tel Aviv University) of the way fiction models and nurtures a complex understanding of human social interaction. Both projects are informed by a methodology which combines an analysis of historical context with phenomenology (particularly that of the early Heidegger) and recent developments in the cognitive sciences.
Tony Phelan is currently working on the literary and philosophical effect of the friendship between Bertolt Brecht and Walter Benjamin, during their years of exile, including their conceptions of history and their investigation of gesture/Gestus. Benjamin, particularly in his study of Romantic art criticism and his work on Paris, in the Passagen-Werk, also provides a guiding critical approach to work on the philosophy and aesthetics of the Jena Romantics and their novels.
