German Staff
Statutory Professors
Prof H Lähnemann
Chair of Medieval German Literature and Linguistics
Henrike Lähnemann’s research interests are medieval manuscripts, the relationship of text and images and how vernacular and Latin literature are connected, currently mainly in late medieval Northern German convents (Letters of the nuns from Lüne, and the edition of prayer-books from the Abbey of Medingen). A major theme is the engagement with the Reformation. She is also a Senior Research Fellow at the FRIAS.
Prof R Robertson
Ritchie Robertson is interested in a wide range of authors and topics in the period from 1750 onwards, notably Kafka; Heine; Schiller; Austrian literature; and the Enlightenment as an international movement. He is co-director of the Oxford Kafka Research Centre (with Carolin Duttlinger and Katrin Kohl) and of the Besterman Centre for the Enlightenment (with Nicholas Cronk), and convenor of the monograph series Germanic Literatures, published by Legenda.He is currently completing a general study of the Enlightenment for Penguin Books, and is planning a study of Machiavelli’s reception in Germany from the seventeenth to the early twentieth century.
Postholders
Professor C Duttlinger
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
Professor D S Groiser
David Groiser’s research interests are in the field of German writing since the Enlightenment, with particular focus on modern German thought, German-Jewish culture, and critical theory.
Professor K Hoge
Kerstin Hoge’s research interests are in the field of German and Yiddish linguistics, with particular focus on syntactic theory and the study of wh-movement and small-clause constructions. Further ongoing research interests are Yiddish children’s writing and the question as to how language is used in the construction of social and personal identity. She is the review editor of the Journal of Linguistics.
Prof K M Kohl
Katrin Kohl’s research focuses on literature and cultural politics in the eighteenth and twentieth/twenty-first century. She is currently working on an edition of the poetic correspondence between Rainer Maria Rilke and Erika Mitterer, investigating dialogic processes in the period of modernism. Other research interests include the Prussian king Frederick the Great; the work of the eighteenth-century poet F.G. Klopstock; the work of holocaust-survivor H.G. Adler; and the theory and practice of metaphor.
Dr T Kuhn
Tom Kuhn’s main research interests are in political literature in the 20th century. He has worked particularly on Bertolt Brecht, and is the series editor of the main English-language edition of Brecht’s works. In addition, he has written on exile and anti-fascist literature, and on more recent drama. He is currently leading the ‘Writing Brecht’ project. Outputs include several major new publications of Brecht’s work in English. He is also working on a book on Brecht’s use of visual art and other pictorial material.
Prof K. J. Leeder
Karen Leeder has published widely on modern German culture, especially of the post-1945 and contemporary periods; her interests range from poetry and the poetic tradition to modernity, GDR literature; contemporary German culture, lateness, women’s writing, angels, spectres, translation, Rilke and Brecht. She has been awarded grants by HEFCE, the British Academy and the AHRC for projects, most recently an AHRC Fellowship to work on her Spectres of the GDR: The Haunting of the Berlin Republic.
She is a prize-winning translator of contemporary German literature: including Evelyn Schlag, Raoul Schrott, Michael Krüger, Durs Grünbein, Volker Braun and Ulrike Almut Sandig and and has been awarded residences in UK and Berlin. She is co-editor of the Companions to Contemporary German Culture series with de Gruyter, is on the board of a number of journals including International Brecht Society Yearbook, OGS, German Monitor and The German Quarterly and has published reviews in a variety of newspapers and journals as well as appearing regularly on radio and television. She was Knowledge Exchange Fellow with the Southbank Centre, London 2014-2015 and continues to work on her project Mediating Modern Poetry: http://www.mmp.mml.ox.ac.uk/
Dr C Louth
Charlie Louth's main research interests include poetry from the 18th century onwards, especially Goethe, Hölderlin, Mörike, Rilke and Celan; romanticism; translation; and comparative literature. He has translated Hölderlin's letters, and done a new translation of Rilke's Briefe an einen jungen Dichter and Brief des jungen Arbeiters. He is working on a book on Rilke.
Professor B Morgan
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.
Professor B Murnane
My main areas of research are the literature and culture of the ‘threshold period’ between 1780 and 1830, modernism, and contemporary drama. Increasingly I have been working in the field of Medical Humanities and the Enlightenment Studies.
Dr Joanna Neilly
My research focuses on German literature and culture of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and its later reception. Particular interests include German Romanticism, the writing of E.T.A. Hoffmann, myth, orientalism, and cultural transfer.
I was awarded my Ph.D at the University of Edinburgh in 2013, for my thesis ‘The Image of the Orient in E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Writing’. My first book, derived from this thesis, is entitled E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Orient: Romantic Aesthetics and the German Imagination, and was published in Legenda’s ‘Germanic Literatures’ series in 2016.
I am now working on a new project about the influence of German Romanticism on contemporary German and world literature.
Professor G Paul
Georgina Paul works principally in the field of contemporary German literature. She specialises in the literature of the GDR (East Germany) and literature post-unification, and has published some important essays on Christa Wolf in particular. She also has a lively interest in gender issues — how gender is theorised, what it means to be a gendered subject, and how this is represented and reflected upon in literary texts. She is a published translator, both of scholarship and of contemporary poetry.
Professor A M V Suerbaum
My reseach interests focus on the dialogue between vernacular and Latin culture, and on dialogue as a literary form. Since 2009, I have been involved in Oxford’s first Marie Curie international training network in the humanities: the project on ‘Mobility of Ideas and Tranmission of Texts’ (MITT) studies the medieval transmission of learning from the universities to the wider readership that could be reached through the vernacular. Together with partners in Antwerp, Freiburg, Lecce, and Leiden, we have built up a network of 20 graduates and post-docs and held regular interdisciplinary workshops, including the Oxford confernce on ‘Medieval Women and their Books’, held jointly at the Talyorian and at Somerville in October 2012.
Recent publications include studies on the use of song in mystical writing, and collaborations with colleagues from musicology on the interplay between music and text in the ‘Jenaer Liederhandschrift’ (conference May 2014) and the ‘Carmina Burana’ manuscript. I am interested more generally in the relationship between cultures in the middle ages – Latin and the vernacular, manuscript and voice, lay and institution, and in the role which gender plays in negotiating such cultural tensions.
Prof A M Volfing
Annette Volfing is a medievalist with particular interest in later medieval religious, mysical, philosophical or allegorical writing. She has written monographs on Heinrich von Mügeln, on medieval uses of the figure of John the Evangelist and on literacy and textuality in Albrecht’s ‘Jüngerer Titurel’. She has co-edited volumes of essays on medieval notions of inner space, on the concept of friendship in medieval culture and on the figure of Dorothea von Montau. She has written articles on the “classic” narrative texts by Heinrich von Veldeke, Wolfram von Eschenbach and Gottfried von Straßburg, and on orientalism in Middle High German literature, and on medieval German religious writing. She is currently working on a monograph on the relationship between mysticism and allegory, focussing on the ‘Tochter Syon’ allegory. She is a Fellow of the British Academy.
Departmental Lecturers
Dr K Gwyer
Kirstin Gwyer’s research interests are in twentieth- and twenty-first-century German literature, with a particular focus on Holocaust literature and contemporary German-Jewish and American-Jewish writing, postmodernism and post-postmodernism, and literature since the Wende.
Dr Nicola Thomas
Departmental Lecturer in German, Queen's College
I specialise in poetry of the post-war period, with a particular interest in comparing British and German literature. My current research project examines representations of extra-terrestrial space in twentieth century poetry.
College Fellows and Lecturers
Myrto Aspioti
Research
I am currently looking at how narrative form structures notions of identity in recent German-language novels. My thesis will include, among others, chapters on authors Wolfgang Herrndorf, Saša Stanišić and Eva Menasse.
Dr Rey Conquer
Stipendiary Lecturer in German, St Hilda's College
My teaching covers the modern period (defined in this case as 1770 to the present), particularly poetry and film, as well as German-English translation.
Dr Margit Dirscherl
College Lecturer in German at St Hugh's College
Margit Dirscherl’s research and teaching interests are in 19th- and 20th-century German and European literature and history of thought, particularly in the transition of Romanticism and affiliated periods into literary modernism. She has worked on Großstadtliteratur, Heinrich Heine, the fin de siècle, literature written by German speaking exiles between 1933 and 1945, and the representation of everyday life in literature.
Dr H Fronius
College Lecturer in German at Exeter College
Helen Fronius’s research interests are in eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century German literature and culture. She has published on the role of German women writers in the Goethe era, and is currently editing a volume of collected essays on women writers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. She is also working on the depiction of infanticide in late eighteenth-century texts.
Ms Claudia Kaiser
DAAD Lektorin (Christ Church, Jesus, Magdalen, Oriel, Somerville)
My academic interest is in linguistics, in particular second language acquisition. I also develop teaching materials and web-based exercises for language learning.
Dr Alex Lloyd
Lecturer in German
Alex Lloyd’s main research interests are in twentieth-century literature and film, particularly memories of childhood, war, and dictatorship. Her AHRC-funded doctoral thesis (Wadham College, 2012) examined post-1989 representations of childhood and youth under Nazism. Recent mini-lectures (‘Teddy Talks’) on ‘How to spot a liar in literature’ and ‘Children’s views of World War II’ are available as University of Oxford podcasts.
She is the co-convener of a research network exploring the interaction of music and words in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century European song tradition, sponsored by The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities.
Dr Alexis Radisoglou
Fellow and Tutor in German at Lincoln College
Alexis Radisoglou’s main research interests are in the field of twentieth-century and contemporary German literature and culture, with a particular emphasis on comparative and interdisciplinary approaches. Most of his work is concerned with the role and status of aesthetic production in the era of globalized modernity, and he is currently working on a book project titled Globe and Planet in Contemporary Aesthetics.
Dr Charlotte Ryland
Editor, New Books in GermanNew Books in German
Charlotte Ryland’s research interests are in German literature of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, with a particular focus on the intersection between literature and politics, on the representation of the Holocaust, and on comparative literature and translation. Her PhD thesis, on the poetry and translations of the post-Holocaust poet Paul Celan, was published in early 2010: ‘Paul Celan’s Encounters with Surrealism: Trauma, Translation and Shared Poetic Space’ (Legenda). She is editor of the bi-annual journal New Books in German and Postdoctoral Researcher on the Writing Brecht project in the Modern Languages faculty at Oxford. Charlotte is committed to languages outreach and to widening participation at university level, and was the founding co-ordinator of the Oxford German Network.
Professor Robert Vilain
Robert Vilain specializes in German, Austrian, French and Comparative Literature in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with a special interest in lyric poetry. He has published widely on authors such as Hofmannsthal, George, Rilke, Yvan and Claire Goll, Thomas Mann, on Franco-German literary relations, detective fiction and the relationship of literature to music and the visual arts.
Professor Vilain was until recently Germanic editor of the Modern Language Review (from October 2013, having previously been joint editor of Austrian Studies from 2003 to 2010) and co-edits the book series Studies in Modern German and Austrian Literature with Alexandra Lloyd (St Edmund Hall) and Ben Schofield (KCL). With Dr Steve Wharton (Bath) he was co-director of the South-West Consortium of the HEFCE-sponsored Routes into Languages.
Between 2014 and 2017 Professor Vilain was one of three investigators (with Professor Andrew Webber, Cambridge, and Dr Judith Beniston, UCL) on a major AHRC-funded project supporting a Digital Critical Edition of the Middle-Period Works of Arthur Schnitzler, to be hosted on the Cambridge University Library website. This project and a further collaboration with the British Library on the Stefan Zweig archive have fully funded two PhD studentships.
DAAD-LektorInnen
Ms Jenny Lemke
I am a “DAAD-Lektorin” (lecturer in German), which means that I am part of the German Academic Exchange Service (i.e. “DAAD”) and teach UG courses for Exeter, Wadham, Brasenose, Trinity, Balliol, Merton and Pembroke.
Konstantinos Mangos
Konstantinos teaches German language and literature and courses on modern German society and culture at undergraduate level. Back in Germany he taught German literature and philosophy at the University of Bamberg.
Ms Miriam Schwarz
Miriam teaches German at Oriel, Somerville, Magdalen, Christ Church and Jesus. She holds a Master Degree in Modern German Literature and Social Anthropology and has previously taught at Shahid Beheshti University, Tehran and Freie Universität Berlin.
ÖAD LektorIn
Veronika Schuchter
I am in the final stages of my doctoral project which investigates supermodern spaces in contemporary British and Canadian women’s writing. I am particularly interested in contemporary women’s writing, feminist theory and gender studies, and I am on the executive committee of the Contemporary Wom
Other
Dr Franziska Bergmann
Junior Professor at the University of Trier and Feodor Lynen Research Fellow at The Queen's College
Franziska Bergmann is Junior Professor in the Department of German Studies of the University of Trier, Germany, where her research and teaching focuses on gender studies, comparative literature, interculturality, postcolonial studies, drama,
Mrs E. Huber
Emma Huber (née Leeson) is the Subject Librarian for German and a graduate of Lady Margaret Hall, University of Oxford, 1996.
Dr H Jones
Fellow and Lecturer in Linguistics, Keble College
Howard Jones’s main research interests are in the early Germanic languages, especially Gothic, Old English, Old High German, and Middle High German. He is currently working with Martin Jones on The Oxford Guide to Middle High German to be published by OUP.
Birgit Mikus
Birgit’s research interests include nineteenth-century studies, women’s writing, political literature, and philosophy of language.
Publications:
Retired Postholders
Prof H M Brown
Emeritus Professor of German, University of Oxford
Professor Hilda Meldrum Brown has published widely on German literary topics from Goethe to Christa Wolf and is internationally known for her work on Heinrich von Kleist. Her research has for some years had a strong interdisciplinary bias and involves studying connections between literature, drama, music, the visual arts, especially in the field of German Romanticism and Richard Wagner. Her new book on the Gesamtkunstwerk and Richard Wagner combines a number of these areas of research and has been supported by The Leverhulme Trust (Emeritus Research Fellowship) and a Hawthornden Fellowship at The International Retreat for Writers.
Dr K Hilliard
Kevin Hilliard’s research is mainly in 18th-century literature and intellectual history. He also makes occasional excursions into 19th- and 20th-century literary studies.
F Lamport
Francis Lamport has published books on Lessing, Goethe and German classical drama, and articles mostly on the literature (especially the drama) of the classical period. He has also published translations, including Schiller’s ‘The Robbers’ and ‘Wallenstein’ (Penguin Classics)
Dr R C Ockenden
Ray Ockenden works on Goethe (poetry and drama); Mörike; Storm; George; Brecht; and post-1845 novels and poetry.
Prof N F Palmer
Emeritus Professor of German Medieval and Linguistic Studies, Fellow of St Edmund Hall
Nigel Palmer’s research interests are in Medieval German language and literature. He is engaged in a collaborative research project, together with a group of colleagues in Germany, Switzerland and the US, on the ‘Literary topography of SW Germany in the later Middle Ages’, which is an attempt to establish a literary history of this region on the basis of the manuscript sources and library history (Latin and German). The project concentrates on Baden-Württemberg, Switzerland and the Alsace. One area of particular interest is the manuscripts from the Cistercian abbeys and nunneries in the region. His principal research project for the moment is an edition and commentary on an illustrated prayer book, the ‘Begerin-Gebetbuch’ from Strasbourg (now in Berne). Other areas of special interest are blockbooks and their place in early printing history, the interface between Latin literature and German literature in the Middle Ages, and palaeography and codicology of the period 1100-1550. He is editor of Oxford German Studies (together with Jim Reed) and of Medium Aevum (together with Corinne Saunders and Sylvia Huot). He is a Fellow of the British Academy and a corresponding fellow of the Medieval Academy of America and of the Academy of Sciences in Göttingen. In 2007 he was awarded the Research Prize of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. In 2013 he was awarded a honorary doctorate by the University of Bern.
Prof A Phelan
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.
Professor J Reed
Jim Reed’s research interests are in German literature, history and ideas from the eighteenth century to the present. Principal authors: Goethe, Schiller, Kant, Heine, Thomas Mann.
R W Sheppard
Professor Sheppard’s main research interests are in the historical avant-gardes; literature and politics in the Weimar Republic; the work of W.G. Sebald; and European Modernism.
Prof H Watanabe-O'Kelly
Helen Watanabe-O’Kelly’s main research interests are in German literature and culture from the late 15th to the early 18th centuries within their European context, in women’s writing in all periods and in the representation of women in German literature and culture. She has made a special study of early modern court festivals of all kinds throughout Europe and of court culture. Her most recent book is Beauty or Beast? The Woman Warrior in the German Imagination from the Renaissance to the Present (OUP 2010). She is the Project Leader of ‘Marrying Cultures: Queens Consort and European Identities, 1500-1800’, one of the 18 projects funded by HERA (Humanities in the European Research Area) as part of its ‘Cultural Encounters’ programme. The project involves collaboration with colleagues in Germany, Poland and Sweden. She is a Fellow of the British Academy.
C J Wells
Mr Wells’ research interests include 16th-century German printing languages and the history of German post-1945.
