Gwendoline Choi is a Clarendon-funded doctoral student at Hertford College, University of Oxford, where she focuses on representations of German colonialism in German literary, visual, and material culture from the 19th century onwards. From October 2025 to July 2026, she was funded by the Berlin State Parliament as a visiting scholar at the Friedrich Schlegel Graduate School of Literary Studies at the Free University of Berlin and at the Department of Modern Art History at the Technical University of Berlin. 

Research

Her research focuses on cultural representations of colonialism in the Wilhelmine era and the Weimar Republic. In tracing the development of how notions of ‘the colonial’ became intertwined with debates surrounding German national identity, her research stresses the entrenchment of colonial fantasies within the fabric of German culture through an analysis of turn of the century literary and visual media. In addition to deploying postcolonial critique to interrogate the colonial enterprise and further explore the concomitant cultural production underpinning it, her research also examines the legacy of German colonialism in Weimar Germany, demonstrating how German national identity in the Weimar Republic was still partially defined through memories of colonial power.

Gwendoline holds a MSt with Distinction from St Peter's College, University of Oxford, and an MA with First Class Honours in Philosophy and German from the University of St Andrews. Her wider research interests include cultural and social history from the 19th century onwards, postcolonial theory, critical theory, and translation and literary theory more broadly.