Postgraduate research in German Studies

Our postgraduate research students benefit from a very wide range of supervision, in history, literature, film and linguistics regarding all periods of the 20th century and beyond. We also have a strong record of success in joint supervision, allowing you to work with two supervisors who have complementary specialist fields.

Our team's research interests include:

• The cultural history of Imperial Germany
• Weimar culture
• Bertolt Brecht
• Modern German-Jewish culture and Holocaust studies
• Gender and sexuality studies
• The literary and cultural history of National Socialist Germany and the GDR
• Cultural Memory
• Turkish-German culture
• Translation and Intercultural studies

See our German Studies staff list

Here's what some of our current doctoral students are working on:

• Matthew Heathcote - 'Der Kadavergehorsam: The Physical and Cultural Fashioning of the Prussian Soldier throughout the Nineteenth Century'
• Laura Schlagheck - 'Discourses of dangerous femininity and their relation to antisemitism, (colonial-)racism and antiziganism in Fin-de-Siècle Culture'

Some of the recent research undertaken by our doctoral students:

• Ahmet Alver (2012) - 'The Politics of Memory: Aesthetics and Narrative in March 12th Novels'
• Eva-Maria Broomer - 'Melusine Figures in the Works of Theodor Fontane'
• David Charlston (2012) - 'An Analysis of the Translation of Intentional Ambiguities in three Translations of Hegel's Phenomenonology' (co-supervised with Maeve Olohan)
• Stuart Cunningham (2013) - 'The Impact of German Unification on the Sorbs'
• Leanne Dawson (2009) - 'Femme: Representations of Queer Femininities in Post-War German Culture'
• Michaela Dixon (2017) - 'Narratives of Resistance in Museums of the GDR and Third Reich'
• Sevinc Elaman (2012) - 'Gender Roles and the Image of 'New Woman' in the Works of Halide Edip Advar and Edith Wharton'
• Elaine Ellery (2006) - 'German-Jewish Literary Expression in the Third Reich with Particular Reference to Gertrud Kolmar'
• Pauline Eyre (2010) - 'Permission to Speak: Representations of the Disabled Body in German Women's Literature of the 1970s and 1980s'
• Chris Gribble (2001) - 'Theodor W. Adorno and Paul Celan'
• Jan Gryta (2016) - 'Cultural Memory and the City: Remembering Pre-War Jewish Life and the Holocaust in Krakow'
• William Hall (2018) - 'Space and Time in the Works of Hoffmann and Kleist'
• Aneta Jarzebska (2018) - 'Alternative Gallery Spaces in Poland and the GDR in the 1970s'
• Leif Jerram (2001) - 'Urban Planning in Early 20th Century Munich'
• Clare Murray - 'Post-Authoritarian Governmentality? Re-Negotiating the 'Other' Spaces of National Socialism in Unified Berlin'
• Gözde Naiboglu (2015) - 'Beyond Representation: Ethics and Aesthetics in Turkish-German Cinema since Unification'
• Rachel Ramsay (2010) - 'Jewish and Turkish Encounters in Contemporary German Language Literature'
• Kate Roy (2008) - 'Cartographies of Identity in the Works of Emine Sevgi Özdamar and Leila Sebbar'
• Sven de Roode (2009) - 'Perception of Europe and the European Union in Germany, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom in Comparative Perspective'
• Caroline Summers (2013) - 'Narrating Christa Wolf's Anglophone Author-Function'
• Helen Vahramian (2009) - 'Imperial Germany and the Ottoman Armenians'
• William Hall - 'Space and Time in the Works of Hoffmann and Kleist' (2018)
• Joseph Twist - 'From Gastarbeiter to Muslim: Cosmopolitan Responses to post 9/11 Islamophobia' (2015)