Prof Rüdiger Görner Centenary Professor of GermanDirector of the Centre for Anglo-German Cultural Relations
Research interests:European Romanticism, Hölderlin's aftermath, Nietzsche's aesthetics, the Tower as a literary motif, the History of Anglo-German cultural relations, Life & Work of Oskar Kokoschka
Professor Rüdiger Görner (born 1957) is Centenary Professor of German and Founding Director of the Centre for Anglo-German Cultural Relations. Between 1999 and 2004 he was Director of the Institute of Germanic Studies where he founded the Ingeborg Bachmann Centre for Austrian Literature. Presently, his main research areas comprise literary representations of the five senses, the poetics of voice, Georg Trakl and literary Modernism, the Tower as a literary figuration. He has published studies on Hölderlin's poetics, the Goethezeit, Austrian literature from Stifter to Thomas Bernhard, on Rainer Maria Rilke and Thomas Mann and his notion of finality in culture as well as studies on literary aesthetics. Rüdiger Görner is a Visiting Fellow of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science and held Visiting Professorships at the Universities of Mainz, Hanover, Heidelberg, Vienna and Salzburg. He is a member of various advisory boards of cultural institutions, publishing houses and academic journals. As a literary critic he writes for some of the leading journals in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, including Die Zeit, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Die Presse and Neue Zürcher Zeitung. He is Corresponding Fellow of the Deutsche Akademie für Sprache und Dichtung and member of the following Editorial Boards: Jahrbuch für Internationale Germanistik (the UK representative) / Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft (Vienna/Amsterdam) /Comparative Critical Studies/Études Germaniques/ Literaturwissenschaftliches Jahrbuch. In 2012 he was awarded the Deutsche Sprachpreis of the Henning Kaufmann Foundation in Weimar. In 2012/13 he was Senior Research Fellow at the Internationale Kolleg Morphomata of Cologne University and in 2013/14 he held the Georg Trakl Visiting Professorship at the University of Salzburg. In 2015 he was awarded the Reimar Lüst Prize of the Alexander-von-Humboldt-Stiftung.
Dr Alasdair KingReader in Film
Alasdair King's research interests are in aspects of film philosophy, political aesthetics, finance aesthetics, cinema, space and time, and German cinema.
Alasdair's research is interdisciplinary, drawing on philosophy and film and media (often but not exclusively in a German context). His first monograph was on Hans Magnus Enzensberger and Marxist media theory, see here and also revisited recently here.
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Prof Astrid KöhlerProfessor of German Literature and Comparative Cultural StudiesDirector of Graduate Studies in Modern Languages and Cultures
Astrid Köhler’s research interests are mainly concerned with the Cultural History of late 18th & early 19th Century Germany on the one hand, and the Literature written by East German Authors before and after German re-unification in 1990 on the other. With regard to the former, she has published widely 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 (see School of Languages, Linguistics and Film website for select bibliography). Her next major project is to investigate the cultural significance of spa-places in England and the German speaking countries around that time.As to the latter, she has published several journal articles and is currently writing a book entitled “Brückenschläge: DDR-Autoren vor und nach der deutschen Wiedervereinigung.” Expert supervision is available in both fields – but also more generally in the history of female authorship and women’s writing in the 19th and 20th centuries and in the historical sociology of literature.
Prof Angus NichollsProfessor of Comparative Literature and German
Angus Nicholls’s areas of research interest include: the comparative study of German and English Romanticisms; Goethe and his philosophical contemporaries (Hamann, Herder, Kant, Schiller, Schelling); theories of myth; the prehistory of psychoanalysis; German critical theory and philosophical hermeneutics (Adorno, Benjamin, Blumenberg, Gadamer); twentieth century Australian poetry.
Dr Émilie Oléron EvansLecturer in French
Émilie Oléron Evan's areas of research interests include: Cultural transfers, circulations of people, objects and thoughts; Art and translation, art in translation; Transnational history of art museums and collections, with a focus on the interactions between France, Germany and Britain; Women in art history: Translators, mediators, scholars and curators; History of the Modern Movement in art, architecture and design
Dr Falco PfalzgrafReader in German Linguistics
Dr Falco Pfalzgraf's main area of research is the application of discourse analysis [not CDA], especially concerning the influence of English upon German (Anglizismen, Denglisch), and the related subject of Linguistic Purism (the latter field being understood in its widest sense and with both a synchronic and diachronic focus). He also conducts research on the relationships between politics, language, and culture. His most recent work concerns discourses of foreignness in school books 1933-45.