Research Group

Cultural History & Literary Imagination

Members

The members and their research interests of the core group are:

• Silke Arnold-de Simine is Assistant Professor of German at the University of Mannheim, Germany. Previously she taught German Literature at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, the University of Karlsruhe, Germany, and at the University of Waterloo, Canada. Her current work focuses on the organization of memory in the media of literature, film and the museum in relation to German reunification. Among her recent publications is a book-length study on gender, gothic and fear in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Leichen im Keller: Zu Fragen des Gender in Angstinszenierungen der Schauer- und Kriminalliteratur, 1790-1830 (2000). She is currently editing a volume in the book series Cultural History & Literary Imagination on Memory Traces: 1989 and the Question of German Cultural Identity, due to be published in 2004.


• Peter Burke is Professor of Cultural History at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Emmanuel College. He has published widely on European cultural history in the period 1500-1700 (history of knowledge, images, language, reading, etc.), most recently Eyewitnessing: The Uses of Images as Historical Evidence (2001), A Social History of Knowledge from Gutenberg to Diderot (2000), and The European Renaissance: Centres and Peripheries (1998). His work in concerned both with learned and with popular culture. He is actively interested in interdisciplinary projects, in cultural theory, and in the problems of method which arise from the study of culture(s).


• Carolin Duttlinger is Fellow and Lecturer in German at Wadham College, Oxford. She studied at the University of Freiburg/Br. and at Cambridge University, where she recently completed her doctoral dissertation on Kafka, photography and early twentieth-century visual culture, with a particular focus on the relation between visual perception and representation in the technical media, and their importance for Kafka's writing. Her current work continues to explore this topic within a wider historical theoretical framework, with particular emphasis on aspects such as the translation and transition between text and image; recording, memory and forgetting; identity, representation and alienation. She is also interested in Freud and psychoanalysis in relation to other (scientific, literary and cultural) discourses of the time.


• Christian Emden is Assistant Professor of German at Rice University, Houston, USA, where he teaches German Intellectual History since 1750. One of the organisers of the research group Cultural History & Literary Imagination, he studied Philosophy, German, and Comparative Literature at Konstanz and Cambridge, where he received his PhD in 2000. A former Research Fellow in the Arts and Humanities at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, he is the author of Nietzsche on Language, Consciousness, and the Body (forthcoming 2004) and is currently completing two book-length studies on Nietzsche's historicism and on Walter Benjamin's anthropology of modernity. He has also published articles on Nietzsche, Benjamin, Warburg and Max Frisch, and on history of science, historical imagination, and classicism. Together with David Midgley he is co-editor of the book-series Cultural History & Literary Imagination. His current work is concerned with the notion of 'classicality' as a historical category, with the history of knowledge in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and with the emergence of historische Kulturwissenschaft in early twentieth-century Germany.


• Constanze Güthenke is Assistant Professor of Hellenic Studies at Princeton University, USA. She studied Classics, European Literature and German at Cambridge and Oxford, and she is particularly interested in the relationship between German and modern Greek literature and culture. Her recently completed doctoral dissertation, which she is currently transforming into a book-length study, entitled The Topos of Freedom: The Importance of Greek Landscape and Locality in German and Greek Writing, 1770-1840, investigates the way in which meaning assigned to images of lanscape, nature and locality influences the political imaginary in Germany and Greece. Acknowledging the interest of current geographical and anthropological research into the symbolic value of place and space, her approach concentrates on the aesthetics of Idealism and Romanticism, the question of the 'materialisation' of the ideal and its representations, and the emergence of the Greek state as a political reality with its literary consequences in Germany and Greece.


• Martina Lauster is Professor of German at Exeter University. A nineteenth-century specialist, her current work is concerned with the 'cultural transfer' between Germany, England and France. She has published on the significance of Western European political and cultural models in German writing of the 1830s/40s and 1890s and also on the impact of the German cultural ideal on English literature. Her main interest at present is the importance of scientific paradigms for the emergence of sociological analysis in the journalism of the 1830s and 1840s. Together with Helmut Koopmann she edited the three-volume Vormärzliteratur in europäischer Perspektive (1996-2000). Most recently she co-edited Karl Gutzkow: Liberalismus, Europäertum, Modernität (2000).


• David Midgley,one of the organisers of the research group Cultural History & Literary Imagination, is Senior Lecturer in German at the University of Cambridge and Director of Studies in Modern Languages at St John's College, Cambridge. He has published extensively on German literature and thought of the period since 1890, with a particular focus on literary modernism (especially Wedekind, Horváth, Brecht, Döblin, Musil and Arnold Zweig). His current research interests lie in the wider area of cultural change in twentieth-century Germany and its reflection in literary writing, and he is actively interested in the theoretical and methodological issues which arise from the study of the relationship between literature and culture. He is editor of The German Novel in the Twentieth-Century: Beyond Realism (1993) and co-editor of the book-series Cultural History & Literary Imagination. His most recent book, Writing Weimar: Critical Realism in German Literature, 1918-1933 (2000) is a comprehensive study of the literature of the Weimar Republic in relation to the social and cultural developments of that period.


• Michael Minden is Senior Lecturer in German at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Jesus College. His most recent project is a cultural history of German literature, and he is particularly interested in the relationship between cultural history and literature in the age of commodity. This involves engagement with other popular forms of cultural representation and entertainment, such as film, as well as an interest in the relation between sales figures and literary/cultural quality or qualities, and the reception of the classical canon in the democratic age. It also involves concern with the varieties of autobiographical literature which have flourished since Proust and Nietzsche, and how they relate to the psychoanalytic/corporate concept of lifestyle. Among his publications are Arno Schmidt: A Critical Study of His Prose (1982) and The German Bildungsroman: Incest and Inheritance (1997). He also edited a volume of essays on Thomas Mann (1995) and, most recently, Fritz Lang's 'Metropolis': Cinematic Visions of Technology and Fear (2000).


• Gregory Moore is Lecturer in German at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth. He studied at the Universities of Leeds and Cologne and at Cambridge University. After his PhD he was a Research Fellow in the Arts and Humanities at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge. Apart from several papers in German Life and Letters and Nietzsche-Studien, he recently published Nietzsche, Biology and Metaphor (2002) and is currently preparing an edition of essays on Nietzsche and Science, due to appear in 2004, and he is also working on a translation of Johann Gottfried Herder's aesthetic writings. He is particularly interested in the influence of science on nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century German philosophy and literature. His work on Nietzsche's use of biological and medical language traces his appropriation of, and ambivalent response to, contemporary work of evolutionary theory, racial anthropology and degenerationist psychiatry. His current work extends this inquiry into the rhetoric of 'health' and 'sickness', vitalism and decadence, in German thought and cultural criticism from the fin de siècle to the Third Reich, against the background of the German reception of Darwinism.


• Gabriele Rippl is Professor and Chair of English Literature at the University of Göttingen, Germany. Previously, she taught at the Universities of Konstanz, Bielefeld, Tübingen and Berne, and she also was a Visiting Fellow at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge. The author of many articles on English, American and German literature and literary criticism, she also published Lebenstexte: Literarische Selbststilisierungen englischer Frauen in der frühen Neuzeit (1998) and edited one of the most influential collections of feminist criticism in Germany, Unbeschreiblich weiblich: Zur feministischen Anthropologie (1993). Most recently, she co-edited together with Aleida Assmann and Monika Gomille two interdisciplinary volumes, Ruinenbilder (2002) and Sammler, Bibliophile, Exzentriker (1998). Her current work is concerned with the problem of 'intermediality', especially text-image relationships in modern American and European literature, and with the reception of antiquity and the classical tradition in the twentieth century.


• Joachim Whaley is Senior Lecturer in German at the University of Cambridge, where he is also Head of the Department of German. A Fellow of Gonville & Caius College, he is currently engaged on a history of the Holy Roman Empire between 1495 and 1806. He has also written extensively on the Enlightenment in Germany, on the historiography of the early modern 'Reich', on its role in the history of German federalism, and on the role of the 'Reich' in German 'Fernerinnerung' generally. He is the author of Religious Toleration and Social Change in Hamburg, 1529-1819 (1985, German trans. 1992), edited Mirrors of Mortality: Studies in the Social History of Death (1981), recently contributed to German History since 1800 (1997), and published many essays and papers in historical journals and books.


• Charlotte Woodford is College Lecturer in German at Selwyn College, Cambridge. She received her PhD from the University of Oxford with a dissertation on the writings of nuns in the early modern Europe, which was recently published as a book, Nuns as Historians in Early Modern Germany (2002). Her current work examines the role of literature in the development of German national identity in the 1870s and 1880s. In this context, she focuses on historical novels and dramas written during those years, and the way in which history was used to create an idea of 'Germanness'. The research looks not only at ideas contained within these texts, but also at the wider reception of this literature through reviews and records of performances, and its connections with other forms of historical writing.