University of Birmingham

Faculty Member, School of Languages, Cultures, Art History and Music

Other Affiliations: Loyola University Maryland, Modern Languages and Literatures

Reader in European Intellectual History

About

I am Cardin Chair in the Humanities at Loyola University Maryland, a visiting appointment for the academic year 2011-12. I am based at the University of Birmingham, UK, where I am Reader in European Intellectual History.

I was educated at the University of Oxford, where I also held a Junior Research Fellowship. I have taught at Oxford, St Andrews, California State (Long Beach), and Birmingham. I have also held a Humboldt Research Fellowship in Germany.

My primary research interests lie in the intellectual and cultural history of Germany from the Enlightenment to the Second World War.

My research specialisms are the reception of Schiller’s poetry and thought, Nietzsche’s philosophy and its reception, the First World War in German culture and memory, and Thomas Mann’s cultural criticism.

I am keen to supervise graduate students wishing to research aspects of German intellectual and cultural history since c. 1750. I am currently supervising four PhD projects:

• Shakespeare and German Reunification: The Interface of Politics and Performance
• Nietzsche, Goethe and Nineteenth-Century Traditions of “Bildung”
• The Son as Adam and Christ: Literary uses of biblical imagery in Hartmann von Aue’s Gregorius, Kafka’s Die Verwandlung and Thomas Mann’s Der Erwählte
• The Creative and Critical Power of the Aphorism in Nietzsche and Hohl

PhD and Master’s dissertations I have supervised to successful completion include:

• “Bildung” and Initiation: Interpreting German and American Narrative Traditions
• Norm, deviance and madness in German literature 1770-1850
• Myths of War: Constructing and Challenging Literary Myths of the First World War in Germany, 1914-1930
• A study of appropriations of Nietzsche in the Weimar Republic
• The Politics of Anglo-German Academic Exchange, 1919-1932
• Reception of the Nibelungenlied in Germany, 1945-1960
• Representations of the Wehrmacht in GDR antifascist literature 1950-1957
• Masculinity and the fantastic in the fiction of Irmtraud Morgner
• Memory, Identity, Historiography: The Renovation of the “Museumsinsel” in Berlin, 1998-2009.

Contact Information