German Research

Cyril Edwards’s research interests are in Medieval German Literature: Old High German, medieval German lyric, courtly romances; eroticism and the supernatural in medieval literature

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.

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.

Howard Jones’s main research interests are in the early Germanic languages, especially Gothic, Old English, Old High German, and Middle High German. He is currently working with Martin Jones on The Oxford Guide to Middle High German to be published by OUP.

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.

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: http://www.mmp.mml.ox.ac.uk/

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 Hölderlin's letters, and done a new translation of Rilke's Briefe an einen jungen Dichter and Brief des jungen Arbeiters. He is working on a book on Rilke.

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.

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.

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.

My reseach interests focus on the dialogue between vernacular and Latin culture, and on dialogue as a literary form. Since 2009, I have been involved in Oxford’s first Marie Curie international training network in the humanities: the project on ‘Mobility of Ideas and Tranmission of Texts’ (MITT) studies the medieval transmission of learning from the universities to the wider readership that could be reached through the vernacular. Together with partners in Antwerp, Freiburg, Lecce, and Leiden, we have built up a network of 20 graduates and post-docs and held regular interdisciplinary workshops, including the Oxford confernce on ‘Medieval Women and their Books’, held jointly at the Talyorian and at Somerville in October 2012.

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’ (conference May 2014) and the ‘Carmina Burana’ manuscript. I am interested more generally in the relationship between cultures in the middle ages – Latin and the vernacular, manuscript and voice, lay and institution, and in the role which gender plays in negotiating such cultural tensions.

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.