Dr Marie Isabel Schlinzig
Leverhulme Early Career Fellow; Fellow by Special Election, St Edmund Hall, Oxford
Address: 47 Wellington Square, Oxford OX1 2JF; St Edmund Hall, Queen's Lane, Oxford OX1 4AR
Email: isabel.schlinzig@seh.ox.ac.uk; isabel.schlinzig@mod-langs.ox.ac.uk
College website: http://www.seh.ox.ac.uk/users/isabelschlinzig
Research
Marie Isabel is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages. Her main areas of research are modern epistolary culture, focusing on last letters and suicide notes, as well as life-writing, in particular fictional (auto)biographies.
Her current research project explores the significance and functions of fictional and non-fictional letters written before death in German, English, and French from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century. The aim of her study is to demonstrate how letter-writing in extremis has been shaped by (and was, in some cases, used to influence contemporaries’ perceptions of) socio-cultural developments, historical events, and the emergence of the new media.
She laid the foundations for this project in her doctoral thesis, which outlined the history of last letters from antiquity to 1800 and analysed the role they played in the literature and culture of the eighteenth century. The thesis will be published by de Gruyter.
Marie Isabel has also worked on the twenty-first century artistic reception of Heinrich von Kleist's (1777-1811) biography; she retains a strong interest in this author's works, life, and 'afterlife'.
Teaching
Marie Isabel's teaching portfolio includes translation, essay writing, and modern German literature for all years (special authors offered: Heinrich von Kleist, Goethe as dramatist, E.T.A. Hoffmann, and Thomas Mann). Currently, Marie Isabel is giving a lecture course on Kleist; in Trinity 2012 she is going to give commentary classes on Kleist and E.T.A. Hoffmann.