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Languages, Linguistics and Film

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  1. Languages, Linguistics and Film
  2. Modern Languages and Cultures
  3. Research in the Department
  4. German

Research in German

The discipline of German Studies has a long tradition at Queen Mary, University of London. We cover linguistics, literature, thought and culture in all periods from the early modern era to the present day, and our expertise includes GDR & FRG studies as well as Austrian and Swiss literature and culture.

A particular area of expertise is Anglo-German Cultural Relations, including the history of German Studies in the United Kingdom. We are home to the Centre for Anglo-German Cultural Relations with its own Yearbook Angermion, its Writer-in-Residence programme and its BASF-funded Lecture Series.

The Centre comprises of the sections Literature, Linguistics, Intellectual History, and Cultural Transfer.

Several members of the department also do interdisciplinary work in fields such as the history of thought, translation and translation theory, medieval studies and gender and queer studies.

The research staff and their areas of expertise: 

Astrid Köhler

  • Cultural History of late 18th & 19th Century Germany (in particular women’s writing, forms of sociability, comparative spa culture), and East German Authors before and after German Re-unification

Angus Nicholls

  • Literature and the human sciences, literary theory, literature and philosophy, German thought 1750 until the present, Anglo-German cultural relations, theories of myth, Goethe, German intellectuals in Australia and Britain

Falco Pfalzgraf

  • Language & Gender across languages, Sociolinguistics, Applied Linguistics, Linguistic purism, the influence of English on German (Fremdwörter / Anglizismen / ‘Denglisch’), discourses of foreignness in school books, the relationships between politics, language and culture, text book analysis.

Emeritus Professor Robert Gillett

  • German, Austrian and Comparative Cultural Studies from 1800 to the present day, especially feminist and queer studies, the work of Hubert Fichte and theatre history

Emeritus Professor Rüdiger Görner

  • European Romanticism, Nietzsche's aesthetics, the History of Anglo-German cultural relations, Life & Work of Oskar Kokoschka, Acoustic phenomena in the works of Franz Kafka, Poetics of Literary Modernism, Music and Literature since 1800

German Grants

Our PhD students have benefitted from grants and scholarships by BASF, AHRC, and the Studienstiftung des Deutschen Volkes.

The main research income for the CAGCR currently comes from the BASF - supporting MA bursaries and the ANGERMION annual Lecture.

Previous sponsors include Bosch UK and the Claussen Simon Foundation (Hamburg) via the Stifterverband deutsche Wissenschaft as well as the British-German Club in Hamburg and the British Chamber of Commerce in Düsseldorf.

We currently have a AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Award with the V&A awarded to Jana Riedel.

Two research students work on the aesthetics of Friedrich Nietzsche and one on the literary phenomenology of objects.

One student received a QMUL research scholarship and one research student is supported by the Studienstiftung des Deutschen Volkes.

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