Speakers and Organisers
Speakers
Elio Baldi has studied history, Italian and literature at the universities of Amsterdam, Utrecht and Bologna. At the moment he is a second-year PhD student in Italian Studies at the School of Modern Languages of theUniversity of Warwick. His research interests include the reception of the works of Italo Calvino in Italy and the Anglo-Saxon countries, as well as authorial personae and cross-media adaptations.
Carmen Bartl holds a PhD in German from the New York University. Her research focuses on the conceptual contamination between the fields of philosophy and history of science, in particular history of medicine. She has published articles on philosophy and illness, especially on Friedrich Schiller and Thomas Bernhard. Her dissertation Schiller and Freud: From the Sublime to Sublimation examines intellectual strategies of coping with body-related impositions.
Sine Birkedal Nielsen completed an interdisciplinary undergraduate degree in Philosophy and Literature at the University of Roskilde, Denmark, 2012. She went on to study a Master’s degree in Modernism: Literature, Theory & Culture at the University of Glasgow, graduating with Merit in 2014. Her dissertation Rescuing the Temporality of Everyday Life: Walter Benjamin and ‘The Arcades Project’ explores key connections drawn between social and political revolution and a new everyday temporality in Benjamin’s own radical experiments with literary form.
Oliver Brett’s research interests centre on French and Italian cinema, particularly documentary cinema and representations of gender, sexuality, identity and performance. Oliver is developing his research profile and teaches on French and Italian cinema modules within the School of Modern Languages at the University of Leicester where he obtained his PhD in 2014.
Johanna Bundschuh-van Duikeren is a postdoctoral fellow at the Insititute of German and Dutch Languages and Literatures at Freie Universität Berlin. She is the author of Geschlecht und Postmoderne (V&R unipress 2014) and the bibliography Niederländische Literatur des 17. Jahrhunderts (De Gruyter 2011). Currently, she is working on a book about representations of work in Dutch prose since the 19th century.
David Darby is an Associate Professor of German and Comparative Literature at the University of Western Ontario and Academic Director of the Ontario/Baden-Württemberg student exchange programme. His publications include contributions on 19th- and 20th-century German writing, as well as on narrative theory and canon formation, and his current research concentrates on the literary and visual representation of urban and near-urban landscapes in the long 19th century, with a primary focus on Berlin and Brandenburg.
Marija Đokić studied History and graduated from the University of Belgrade, Faculty of Philosophy (2010). In 2013, she completed a Master in Eastern European Studies at LMU Munich about Đorđe Stratimirović and his self-positioning in the Habsburg empire. Since April 2013, she is a PhD Student at the LMU and has dealt with the history of theatre in the Southeast Europe as well as the influences of the Habsburg monarchy and the Ottoman Empire on its development. She has been the associate of the DFG project Global Theatre Histories.
Lucy Duggan is a doctoral student at Oxford University; her thesis focuses on the role of Prague in contemporary German and Czech-German literature. She is currently a visiting student at the Charles University, Prague. She previously read German at Oxford and completed an MA in Eastern European Studies at the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich.
Samuel Hamen studied German and History in Heidelberg from 2007 to 2013. He concluded his studies with a thesis on the urban poetics of German poet Stefan George (1868-1933). Since February 2014, he has been writing his PhD thesis with the working title Autorinszenierung bei Thomas Kling. He works as an external collaborator for the CNL (Centre national de littérature) in Luxembourg and is currently preparing the complete works of the Luxembourgish poet and aphorist Léopold Hoffmann. He supervises a literature column for the Luxembourgish daily Letzebuerger Journal.
Sven Hanuschek is Professor of Neuere deutsche Literaturwissenschaft at LMU Munich where he has run the department of Germanistik, Komparatistik, Nordistik, Deutsch als Fremdsprache since 2004. He writes regularly for the press and is member of P.E.N., chairman of the International Heinar Kipphardt Society, and an editor of the yearbook treibhaus and the series neoAvantgarden (edition text + kritik). He has written books on Heinar Kipphardt, Uwe Johnson, Erich Kästner, Elias Canetti, Heinrich Heine, a history of West German P.E.N., Laurel & Hardy; and he edited Kipphardt, Kästner, Canetti, and Bernard von Brentano.
Charles Jones studied Moral Sciences and History at Cambridge (1967-73) and worked at the Universities of London and Warwick before returning to Cambridge in 1998. As a Reader in International Relations he has taught international thought to Master’s students in the Cambridge department of Politics and International Studies. His leading research interests have been the modern history of Argentina and its neighbours, international business history, the history of thought about war and trade, and military ethics, especially as represented in literature and film.
Botakoz Kassymbekova received her PhD from the Humboldt Universität zu Berlin. Her dissertation titled Despite Cultures: Early Soviet Rule Between Violence and Collaboration in Tajikistan is under contract with the University of Pittsburgh Press. She pursued her postdoctoral project on fin-de-siecle urban globalization in Moscow and St. Petersburg at the Technische Universität in Berlin and as a visiting fellow at Columbia University. She is currently an academic staff member at the Forum Transregionale Studien in Berlin.
Esther Leslie is Professor of Political Aesthetics at Birkbeck, University of London, UK. Her first book was Walter Benjamin: Overpowering Conformism (Pluto, 2000). She has also written a biography of Benjamin (Reaktion, 2007). In 2002 she published Hollywood Flatlands: Animation, Critical Theory, and the Avant Garde (Verso). Synthetic Worlds: Nature, Art, and the Chemical Industry (Reaktion) appeared in 2005. Derelicts: Thought Worms from the Wreckage was published by Unkant in 2014.
Robert Lethbridge is Emeritus Professor of French Language and Literature in the University of London. His current research and postgraduate teaching is now in association with Cambridge’s Department of French, where he was a University Lecturer until 1994 and is now Honorary Professor. His work is focused on late nineteenth-century France and, in particular, the relationship between literature and the visual arts in that period. He was made Commandeur dans l'Ordre des Palmes Académiques in 2013 for services to French culture and scholarship.
David Peleman is assistant professor at Ghent University, Department of Architecture & Urban Planning, where he is responsible for the course Theory of Urban Design. In 2013 he completed his doctoral dissertation entitled Les Hommes de la Route. Engineering the Urban Society of the Modern Road in Belgium, 1889-1962. His post-doctoral research further explores how industrialists, scientists and technicians who were responsible for the process of urbanisation and the design of the city in Western Europe during the 19th and 20th century.He was involved in various research projects of Labo S (Ghent University) on architecture and urbanism in Flanders.
Andrea Penso earned a Master Degree at the University of Padua in 2011 with a thesis entitled Tra lo sdegno e il riso. La dimensione satirica dell’ultimo Leopardi dalla Palinodia ai Paralipomeni. He has been a PhD candidate in the Department of Philological and Literary Studies since 2012, and has worked on a project about Vincenzo Monti’s early poetical style and language. He was a visiting PhD student at the University of Oxford (UK) in 2013, has done a Doctoral Stage at the University Sorbonne Nouvelle - Paris 3 (FR) in 2014, and is currently working as an Italian language instructor at the Stendhal University – Grenoble 3 (FR).
Cristina Sasse is currently a Research and Teaching Assistant at the department of Early Modern History at Justus-Liebig-Universität Giessen, Germany. She holds a degree in History, English Language & Literature, and Education. She ha spent one academic year at the University of Gloucestershire at Cheltenham. Her PhD project looks at the ways in which English directories from between 1760 and 1820 represent and at the same time construct urban spaces and structures. Major fields of interest are urban spatial practices, such as house numbering and place-naming, as well as the construction of urban identities through various media.
Markus Schiegg is a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Bristol (Humboldt foundation), where he is working on language variation in lower-class writing from 19th-century ‘Lunatic Asylums’. He completed his PhD on early medieval glosses in 2013 at the Ludwig-Maximilian University in Munich. His research interests are in historical linguistics, sociolinguistics and pragmatics.
Godela Weiss-Sussex is Senior Lecturer in German at the Institute of Germanic & Romance Studies (University of London) and Fellow in German at King’s College, Cambridge. Her current research projects focus on concepts of Jewishness and femininity in the work of German-speaking Jewish women writers in Berlin 1900-1918, department stores as symbols of modernity, and feminism and eugenics in Wilhelmine Germany. She recently co-edited Protest and Reform in German Literature and Visual Culture, 1871-1918 (2015), The Berlin Department Store: History and Discourse (2013) and Beyond Glitter and Doom. The Contingency of the Weimar Republic (2012).
Louise Zbiranski received an MPhil in Philosophy at the Ludwig-Maximlians Univeristät Munich (2011) and an MA in Political Sciences at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid (2013). Since February 2013, she is a PhD candidate in history and a scholarship holder of the Cluster of Excellence The Formation of Normative Orders at the University of Frankfurt. Her dissertation has the working-title The Citizen in Arms as Controversial Ideal of Civic Emancipation in 19th-century Spain and France.
Organisers
Margit Dirscherl is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Bristol. Her research and teaching interests lie in 19th and 20th century German and European literature and history of thought, particularly in the transition of Romanticism and affiliated periods into literary modernism. In 2012, she obtained a PhD with a thesis on the poetics of the city in the works of Heinrich Heine, and is currently working on her postdoctoral project Transitory Monuments: The Literary Aesthetics of the Railway Station. She is a co-editor of ANGERMION: Yearbook of Anglo-German Cultural Relations.
Astrid Köhler studied in Jena and Freie Universität Berlin. From 1993-95 she was Lektorin at Gonville & Caius College Cambridge and is now a Reader in German at Queen Mary University of London. Her research interests are divided between two broad fields: the Cultural History of late 18th & early 19th Century Germany, and the Literature written by East German Authors before and after German re-unification. She has published on salons and other forms of sociability in the Age of Goethe as well as on the public rituals and festivities, literary journals and prose fiction of the period.