German Research

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 

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.

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.

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.

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. 

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. From 2019-2020 Alex will be a Knowledge Exchange Fellow. She will work with the Weiße Rose Stiftung in Munich on the White Rose Project.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.