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Languages, Linguistics and Film

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Professor Robert Gillett, MA (Oxon) PhD (Cantab)

Robert

Emeritus Professor in German and Comparative Cultural Studies

Email: r.m.gillett@qmul.ac.uk

Profile

Robert Gillett is Emeritus Professor of German and Comparative Cultural Studies, and has been teaching at Queen Mary for thirty years. As a queer feminist, he helped to introduce the first course on Gay and Lesbian Studies at the University of London, and still teaches two courses on sexuality and gender studies called On the Subject of Sex. He has written extensively on women writers, edited two books and a journal special issue on queer and made a particular study of the German proto-queer author Hubert Fichte. He is currently working on a book on a female playwright called Elsa Bernstein. He refuses to accept the tendentious equation of literature with novels, and puts special emphasis in his teaching on poems and plays. He is the editor, with Astrid Köhler, of the collected works of the influential East German poet Adolf Endler and is working towards writing a new history of German drama. He heads the Cultural Transfers strand of the Centre for Anglo-German Cultural Relations, and edits the reviews section of the Centre’s yearbook Angermion. Accordingly he has taught modules on Prejudice and Anglo-German Cultural Relations, and he is also a member of the European Shakespeare Research Association. He also has a strong practical and theoretical interest in translation, and his next projects include a chapter for the Routledge Handbook on Translation and Sexuality, a discussion with the poet Kerstin Hensel on translating her poems, and a translation of the complete poems of the great Baroque poet Sibylla Schwarz into English. He is currently co-supervising a doctoral dissertation on queer translation. And he has been heavily involved with the Greater London German Network (www.glgn.org.uk).

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