Our research in German studies explores German film, East German culture, translation studies, critical discourse analysis and German political and media discourse.
Research centres
German studies is host to the East German Studies Archive, which for several decades has acted as a centre of excellence for the study and research into the politics and culture of the former GDR and post-unification East Germany.
Staff actively collaborate with the University's , the , the , and the .
Staff research interests
The main areas of staff research activity and doctoral supervision in German studies are given below. Do get in touch if you are interested in a related topic, as supervision can be arranged jointly with other departments or one of our partners.
Dr Alice Christensen
- Nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature
- History of medicine and the natural sciences in Germany
- History of German film
- Realist literature
- Literary modernism
Dr Ellen Pilsworth
- Eighteenth-century literature
- Political poetry and drama
- Gendered representations and writing strategies
- Literary representations of war, conflict and revolution
- Literature and culture of ‘1968’ and anti-authoritarian protest movement
- Exile writing
- (Critical) Discourse analysis
- Political discourse
- Media discourse
- Silence and absence in discourse and communication
- Counter discourses
- Comparative analyses of discourses
- Corpus-assisted discourse studies
Dr Ute Wölfel
- History of German film
- Visual representations of war and conflict
- Visual representations of children and childhood
- East German literature and visual culture
- Twentieth-century German literature
- Memory studies
Staff research activities and collaborations
Dr Alice Christensen works on modern German literature and film. She is particularly interested in intersections between literature and scientific thought. She is currently researching literature about insects in the years around 1930.
Together with Dr Carrie Friese at the London School of Economics, she is organising a conference on the history of insect research, funded by the British Academy and the Wellcome Trust. She is also working on a book about the history of thinking about temperature in German literature, philosophy, and scientific periodicals around 1900.