Research in German Studies at Queen Mary covers the literature, culture and media of Germany, Austria and German-speaking Switzerland from the eighteenth century to the present.

The research staff and their areas of expertise include:

• Robert Gillett
  German and Austrian literature, gay and queer literature and film, Johann Peter Hebel, Jochen Hick, Uwe Johnson, Hubert Fichte
• Rüdiger Görner
  Goethe, Hölderlin, Nietzsche, Rilke, Thomas Mann, Thomas Bernhard, Ilse Aichinger, Heimat , literature of the absurd, literature of the threshold, the diary, twentieth century elegy, music and literature.
  Director of the Centre for Anglo-German Cultural Relations
• Patricia Howe
  Nineteenth century German literature, Annette von Droste-Hülshoff, Theodor Storm, Theodor Fontane, women's writing, travel literature, narrative theory and narrative fiction
• Alasdair King
  Alasdair King’s current research interests include investigations into the ‘spatial imaginary’ of cinema, drawing on theorists such as Kracauer, Benjamin, Lefebvre, Deleuze, Augé, and Bruno. He is currently working on the representation of the spatial in recent German films, such as in Edgar Reitz’s Heimat trilogy and in the work of Tom Tykwer. His wider research interests include the history of German cinema and German cultural theory from Kracauer to Enzensberger.
• Astrid Köhler
  Cultural history of late eighteenth and early nineteenth century Germany, including courtly and bourgeois sociability, public rituals and festivities, literary journals, and prose fiction; current East German literature works by East German authors written before and after German unification in 1990
• Angus Nicholls
  The comparative study of English and German Romanticisms; Goethe and his philosophical contemporaries (especially Hamann, Herder, Kant and Schelling); German Critical Theory and Philosophical Hermeneutics (especially Walter Benjamin, Hans-Georg Gadamer and Hans Blumenberg); philosophical and literary influences upon Sigmund Freud; the influence of European philosophical ideas upon twentieth century Australian poetry and prose.
• Leonard Olschner
  German and comparative literature, literature and society, cultural studies from the eighteenth to the twentieth century, Goethe, Lichtenberg, literature of the twentieth century, lyric poetry, literature of the Shoah, Paul Celan, Adorno, translation studies
• Falco Pfalzgraf
  Dr Falco Pfalzgraf's main area of research is 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.
• Felicity Rash
  Socio-linguistics, language of Switzerland, feminist linguistics, language history, contemporary Swiss literature, German-language propaganda, the language of advertising.
  Project leader of "The Discourse of German Nationalism and Anti-Semitism 1871-1924" Research Project

Other active researchers include:

• Silvia Ranawake
  Medieval lyric, Walther von der Vogelweide

Current and recent graduate research includes theses on:

• The German and French detective novel
• Rainer Maria Rilke's reading of Nietzsche
• Autobiography
• The novels of Georg Hermann
• Language and gender
• The post-1945 novel
• The rôle of confidante in medieval epic
• The life and works of Richard Dehmel
• Christians performing Jews in German late medieval carnival culture
• Poets of the Bukovina

We host a regular Research seminar and a postgraduate Research Colloquium.