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.matthews-schlinzig@seh.ox.ac.uk; isabel.matthews-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 was published with de Gruyter under the title: Abschiedsbriefe in Literatur und Kultur des 18. Jahrhunderts (Last Letters in Eighteenth-Century Literature and Culture).

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, commentary classes on Kleist and E.T.A. Hoffmann, and revision tutorials. In HT 2014 she is going to give a lecture course entitled 'Writing madness around 1800: Goethe, Tieck, Hoffmann, Büchner'.