Research in German Studies
German Studies at Warwick is consistently ranked among the top German departments in the UK, and produces internationally-recognised publications and projects with demonstrable impact. Our work engages with the diversity of German language culture from 1750 to the present. We approach our material from a wide range of theoretical perspectives, though always with a strong sense of how culture reflects the differing historical contexts that gave rise to it, be they social, political, intellectual or aesthetic.
We also run the Warwick Workshop for Interdisciplinary German Studies, sponsored by Warwick Humanities Research Centre, at which colleagues, guest speakers both national and international and research students can present work in progress or advanced conference-style papers.
Please browse the links below to find out more about our research foci, current projects, forthcoming events and individual staff research specialisms.
Current projects
- Adorno's Rhinoceros: Art, Nature, Critique
- Constellations of Alterity: Conceptions of Femininity and Jewishness of Modern German and Austrian Culture
- Dialogue, Movement, and World Entanglement: Towards a Reconceptualization of World Literature
- Literature after Dystopia - Fictional Representations of Futures in Times of COVID-19
- Re-imagining Islam: From Alterity to Empathy
-
Remembering Wartime Rape: The Emotional Politics of Cultural Memory
-
Resonances: Love and Intimacy in Contemporary German-Language Literature
Research specialisms
- Aesthetic theory from the Enlightenment to the present
- Intellectual and cultural transfer mediated through 18th and 19th century German-language literature
- Islam and Orientalism in modern German culture
- Rising nationalism and cosmopolitanism during the era of German Romanticis
- Constructions of gender, nation, and race as part of capitalist modernity
- Representations of National Socialism and World War II, and post-war memory cultures in East and West Germany
- Holocaust and Jewish Studies, theories of antisemistism
- Critical theory, particularly the early Frankfurt School
- Cultural memory and narratives of trauma and victimhood since 1945 in public discourse, literature, film and art
- Contemporary gender debates
- German-speaking regional, national, transnational, and world literatures
- Changing cultural narratives of German unification
- The role of literature in creating global pandemic narratives