German Staff
Statutory Professors
Prof. Henrike 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.
Postholders
Professor C Duttlinger
Carolin Duttlinger’s research interests are in modern German literature, thought, and visual culture, with a particular emphasis 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.
With Prof. Daniel Weidner (Humboldt University Berlin), she is heading an international research project on Walter Benjamin’s Journalistic Networks, funded by the Oxford-Berlin Research Partnership.
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.
Ms Claudia Kaiser
Senior Language Instructor
As the Senior Instructor for German, Claudia Kaiser coordinates German language teaching across the colleges. She teaches a variety of undergraduate language courses such as grammar, essay writing and translation. She also coordinates and teaches the German beginners’ programme.
Prof K M Kohl
Faculty Lecturer in German, Fellow of Jesus College
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: https://mmp.mml.ox.ac.uk/. She was elected to the Academia Europaea in 2020.
Professor Charlie 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 a selection of Hölderlin’s letters, and done a new translation of Rilke’s Briefe an einen jungen Dichter and Brief des jungen Arbeiters. He has recently published Rilke: The Life of the Work (OUP, 2020), and is working on a translation of Hölderlin’s complete correspondence.
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 have also published on the practice and perception of authorship in the second half of the nineteenth century.
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 and critical reception of German Romanticism in contemporary German and world literature. I also enjoy public engagement work and have contributed to a podcast series on the composer Gustav Mahler, produced by Aaron Cohen of New York Public Radio: https://www.theworldofgustavmahler.org/
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
Faculty Chair; Associate Professor in German, Fellow of Somerville
Research interests focus on medieval German literature in its interdisciplinary context, e.g. the dialogue between vernacular and Latin culture, dialogue as a literary form, and the use of song. 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’ and the ‘Carmina Burana’ manuscript.
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, on literacy and textuality in Albrecht’s ‘Jüngerer Titurel’, and on bridal mysticism in the medieval Daughter Zion allegory. 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 a Fellow of the British Academy and was appointed to the Council from September 2019.
Departmental Lecturers
Dr Linus Ubl
Departmental Lecturer in German, Somerville College
I am a medievalist, particularly interested in the interplay between history and literature. This includes historiography, the history of Christianity (especially mysticism), cultural history as well as palaeography, but also reception studies and the question of how history is told in the present, i.e. books, movies and popular culture.
Dr K Gwyer
Kirstin Gwyer’s research interests are in twentieth- and twenty-first-century literature, with a particular focus on Holocaust literature and contemporary Jewish writing, postmodernism and post-postmodernism, literature since the Wende, and comparative contemporary aftermath writing.
College Fellows and Lecturers
Dr Rey Conquer
Stipendiary Lecturer in German
I’m a writer and researcher based in Modern Languages. I’ve worked mostly on German literature of the late nineteenth century to the present, particularly poetry and writing on art. I’m interested in the idea of aesthetic expertise, and most of my work has looked at how people have understood the skills and knowledge required for an engagement with works of art, literature or architecture. My first book dealt with how to ‘read colour’ in Modernist poetry. I’m currently interested in the problem religious belief in art and literature poses to the secular imagination.
Dr Alexandra Lloyd
Lecturer in German
Dr Alex Lloyd teaches German language and literature from the mid-eighteenth to the twenty-first century, translation between German and English, and film studies. Her main research interests lie in twentieth-century literature and visual culture and cultural memory studies. She currently leads the White Rose Project, a research and engagement initiative bringing the story of the White Rose resistance circle to English-speaking audiences.
Dr Steven P. Lydon
Wolfson College Junior Research Fellow
I am a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the Department of Modern Languages and Junior Research Fellow at Wolfson College. Previously I was Teaching Fellow at Durham University and Japan Society for the Promotion of Science Postdoctoral Researcher at Tokyo University.
Dr Christoph J Pretzer
Lektor and Lecturer of German
Research
Both a philologist and a historian by training I am particularly interested in texts at the intersection of Medieval German Literature (“Ältere Deutsche Literaturwissenschaft”) and Medieval History.
Dr Joanna Raisbeck
Stipendiary Lecturer in German, St Hilda's College and Wadham College
Research
Dr Charlotte Ryland
Editor, New Books in GermanNew Books in German
Charlotte Ryland is Director of the Stephen Spender Trust and founder of the Queen’s College Translation Exchange, both Oxford-based organisations that promote multilingualism, language-learning and translation. Charlotte is committed to languages outreach and to widening participation at university level, and was the founding co-ordinator of the Oxford German Network.
Dr Ben Schaper
I am currently a Lecturer in German at St Hugh’s/St Anne’s and Worcester/LMH. After gaining an MSt and a DPhil from Oxford I taught at the Universities of Munich and Durham for the past three years.
Dr Robert Vilain
Senior Tutor, St Hugh's College
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.
ÖAD LektorIn
Research Fellows/Researchers
Dr Karolina Watroba
Post-Doctoral Research Fellow in Modern Languages at All Souls College
I work on modern literature and film across eight European languages and beyond, with a focus on material in German, English, and Polish. I am a Fellow of All Souls College as well as a member of the German Sub-Faculty and the Oxford Comparative Criticism and Translation Research Centre (OCCT).
Dr Mary Boyle
Leverhulme Early Career Fellow
Mary Boyle is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow and Junior Research Fellow at Linacre College, working on cross-cultural Anglo-German medievalism in the long nineteenth century. Mary also works on medieval German and English comparative literature more broadly, and particularly on medieval religious writing.
Dr Meindert Peters
Leverhulme Early Career Fellow
Dr. Meindert Ewout Peters, B.A. (AUC), M.Phil. (Oxon), D.Phil. (Oxon)
Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the Department of Modern Languages
Junior Research Fellow at New College.
Dr Emily Troscianko
Research Associate, The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities (TORCH)
My current research builds on my background in cognitive literary studies to investigate the connections between narrative reading and eating disorders. I triangulate amongst a range of empirical methods, which have so far included a large-scale survey study, experiments involving reading full texts in their entirety, and computational analysis of social media data. The most striking result so far is that reading fiction specifically about eating disorders is typically perceived as harmful by people with an eating disorder, while reading other fiction is perceived as neutral or positive.
This work has developed out of my longer-standing interests in how readers respond to fiction as well as what makes text seem realistic. My doctorate and my first monograph, Kafka’s Cognitive Realism (2014), explored Kafka’s works in terms of their “cognitive realism” in the realms of perception and emotion, applying cognitive-scientific findings and theories directly to the analysis of textual features and readers’ potential interactions with them. In this context I became especially interested in “second-generation” cognitive science, which takes seriously the embodied, enactive, embedded, and extended nature of the mind—factors which are crucial to understanding eating disorders as well as literary responses.
Junior Research Fellows
Dr Sebastian Klinger
Matthews Junior Research Fellow
Dr Sebastian P. Klinger connects literary studies to the history of science.
Other
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.
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 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.
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 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.
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 has always been interested in German literature and culture from the late 15th to the 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 research, however, has expanded its chronological range. Her book Beauty or Beast? The Woman Warrior in the German Imagination from the Renaissance to the Present (OUP 2010) examines literature and art right up to the 1990s. Her most recent book, Projecting Imperial Power. New Nineteenth-Century Emperors and the Public Sphere, discusses new emperors in France, Austria, Germany, Brazil, Mexico and India from 1804 to 1947 (OUP 2021). She was 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 involved collaboration with colleagues in Germany, Poland and Sweden. She is a Fellow of the British Academy and was awarded an honorary DLitt by the National University of Ireland in 2016.
C J Wells
Mr Wells’ research interests include 16th-century German printing languages and the history of German post-1945.
In Memoriam
Prof N F Palmer
Emeritus Professor of German Medieval and Linguistic Studies, Fellow of St Edmund Hall
Nigel Palmer’s research interests were 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. His work as editor of Oxford German Studies was featured in the celebratory volume 50/4. In 2022, he was awarded the inaugural Meister-Eckhart-Forschungspreis.
