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Hannah Scheithauer obtained a BA in French and German (2016-2020) and an MSt in Comparative Literature and Critical Translation (2020-21) from Jesus College, University of Oxford, and took courses at Georg-August-Universität Göttingen (2015-16) and École Normale Supérieure Paris (2018-19). She recently completed a comparative DPhil project at The Queen’s College (2021-25), which was supported by the Clarendon Fund and a Queen’s College Graduate Scholarship, and spent six months as guest doctoral researcher at Friedrich Schlegel Graduate School in Literary Studies at Freie Universität Berlin (2023-24).

During her DPhil, she was awarded the 2023 R. Gapper Postgraduate Essay Prize by the Society for French Studies and was named runner-up for the 2024 Women+ in German Studies Essay Prize.

Her doctoral thesis explored the intersections of post-Holocaust and postcolonial memories in contemporary literatures in French and German. The project focused on narrative texts and worked through a series of comparative case studies, bringing together works by authors including Ingeborg Bachmann, Assia Djebar, Boualem Sansal, Jérôme Ferrari, Anne Weber, Anouar Benmalek, and Sharon Dodua Otoo. The thesis was particularly interested in the ways in which literary texts articulate ethical complexity, charting individual moral positions as they move across different historical contexts. In so doing, the project demonstrated, literature proved able to respond productively to ongoing cultural controversies surrounding the question whether Nazism and colonialism should be compared to begin with and encourage readers to reflect on the ethical stakes of remembrance today.    

Alongside her own research, Hannah has taught a range of courses in French and German literature and translation. In 2025-26, Hannah is organising tutor in French at St John’s College and teaches Modern French and Francophone Literature as Departmental Lecturer. 

Publications and Selected Conference Papers:

  • ‘Spectral Time and the Ethics of “Multidirectional Memory”: Anouar Benmalek’s Fils du Shéol (2015)’, Holocaust Studies (2025), https://doi.org/10.1080/17504902.2025.2563927.
  • ‘Cycles of Violence and Fictions of the “Grey Zone” in Jérôme Ferrari’s Où j’ai laissé mon âme (2010)’, R. Gapper Postgraduate Prize essay; forthcoming with French Studies in 2026.
  • ‘Subversive Temporalitäten des Sprachwechsels bei Odile Kennel’, paper delivered at ‘AfterWords: Positioning German Poetry in the Twentieth Century and Beyond’ conference, Freie Universität Berlin/University of Oxford (02/2024), anthology forthcoming with Berlin Universities Publishing, Edition AVL Neue Reihe 3 (2025).
  • ‘The Sankofa Bird and the Angel of History: Narrative Temporality and Memory Ethics in Sharon Dodua Otoo’s Adas Raum (2021) and Anouar Benmalek’s Fils du Shéol (2015)’, paper given at the annual conference of the Association for German Studies (AGS), University of Oxford (09/2025).
  • ‘The Revue internationale (1960-1964): Towards an Intellectual Counter-Community of Memory’, paper given at ‘(Trans)national Memory Spaces’ conference, University of Aachen (05/2023), anthology forthcoming with De Gruyter (2026).

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