Dr Sibylle Erle
Junior Research Fellow
Sibylle Erle’s research interests range from Blake, 1790s politics, Optics, Dissent, Landscape gardening, publication history, reception studies to Anglo-German relations, theatre aesthetics and problems of representation. Her research on Blake engages with portraiture, material creation, colour/ing and spiritual creation and explores the aesthetic, medical, scientific and cultural contexts of Blake's understanding of the body.
Dr Robert Gillett
Senior Lecturer in German, Head of German Department
Robert Gillett works on modern German and Austrian literature, and gay and queer literature and film. He has written on figures as varied as Johann Peter Hebel and Jochen Hick, and is co-editor of a volume of essays on Uwe Johnson. He is currently involved in two major projects on Bertolt Brecht and Hubert Fichte, on whom he has published extensively. His most recent work is concerned with Fichte and New York, W.G. Sebald and Judith Butler. Apart from Hubert Fichte, he has supervised research into Late Medieval Carnival Plays, Thomas and Klaus Mann, Detective Fiction and Queer Film. Areas of special interest, in which expert supervision is available, include: The History of the Theatre, The Cultural History of Travel, German Literature of the Period between 1945 and 1989, Gay and Lesbian Studies, and The Theory and Practice of Queer.
Prof Rüdiger Görner
Professor of German, Head of the School of Languages, Linguistics and Film
Rüdiger Görner’s teaching and research ranges from the poetics of thought, music and literature, to the legacy of Romanticism. His most recent monographs include: Form und Verwandlung. Ansätze zu einer literaturästhetischen Morphologie. (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2010); Die Pluralektik der Romantik. Studien zu einer epochalen Denk- und Darstellungsform. Literatur und Leben Neue Folge. Vol 78. (Cologne: Böhlau Verlag, 2010); Dem lebendigen Geist. Britisch-deutsche Interventionen zur Hochschulpolitik. Forum 81. Deutscher Hochschulverband. (Bonn 2011); Gewalt und Grazie. Heinrich von Kleists Poetik der Gegensätzlichkeit (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2011).
Dr Astrid Köhler
Reader in German
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.
Dr Angus Nicholls
On Research Leave from 10/2011 until 04/2013
Lecturer in German and Comparative Literature
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. He is currently (as of 2011-12) preparing a monograph for Routledge on the German philosopher Hans Blumenberg.
Dr Falco Pfalzgraf
Language Centre Academic Coordinator
Dr Falco Pfalzgraf's main area of research is the application of discourse analysis, especially concerning the influence of English upon German, 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.
