Institutionen
University of Warwick, Department of German Studies
Vita
I studied Philosophy, Literature and Physics in Paris and Hamburg, where I was also involved in the non-commercial radio station FSK and in running the independent political library ‘Hamburger Studienbibliothek’, and worked at the concentration camp memorial site Hamburg-Neuengamme and in the ‘Institut für die Geschichte der deutschen Juden’. An MA in ‘Gender and Ethnic Studies’ brought me to London. During that time, I investigated conceptions of the bourgeois subject and the modern state as reflected in Enlightenment debates on Jewish and female emancipation. I moved on to Nottingham to write a PhD on the intersection of constructions of race, class, gender, and nation in 19th century Germany as reflected in Gustav Freytag’s novel Soll und Haben (1855), and stayed at the University of Nottingham for another year as a Teaching Fellow. I joined the Department of German Studies at Warwick in September 2006 and spent the winter terms 2009 and 2012 as a Visiting Scholar at the University of Chicago. During the academic year 2013-14, I will hold a Research Fellowship at the Frankel Institute for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor).
Aktuelle Projekte
My current research investigates constellations of images of femininity and Jewishness at important junctures in modern German and Austrian history between the Enlightenment and the Fin de Siècle. The constructions of different kinds of ‚others‘ can serve as a key to understanding changing concerns regarding modernity, identity and the boundaries of the national community. The project aims to move beyond an exclusive focus on the parallels and intersections of ideas of Jewishness and femininity, e.g. in the figure of the ‘beautiful Jewess’ or the stereotype of the ‘effeminate Jew’. By also investigating the often quite different or even complementary discursive roles played by these notions of alterity and their interrelations, I hope to contribute to a more three-dimensional picture of the social developments to which they respond.
I am also preparing an edited volume on Antisemitism and the Politics of Emancipation with Werner Bonefeld (York) and Marcel Stoetzler (Bangor), exploring the contradictory and historically changing relationship between antisemitism and the political Left, broadly conceived.
Publikationen
Monograph
Gespaltene Moderne. Gustav Freytags Soll und Haben – Nation, Geschlecht und Judenbild [Split modernity: Gustav Freytag’s Debit and Credit – nation, gender and the image of the Jew], Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2007.
Editorial work
European Societies 14: 2, 2012, special issue on Antisemitism, Racism, and Islamophobia, guest edited with Robert Fine.
Chapters in edited volumes
‚„Wer immer das jüdische Wesen haßt, der haßt es zunächst in sich“ – Otto Weininger als Theoretiker und Praktiker des Antisemitismus’, in Hans-Joachim Hahn und Olaf Kistenmacher (Hg.), Beschreibungsversuche der Judenfeindschaft. Zur Geschichte der Antisemitismusforschung vor 1944, Berlin: De Gruyter (im Erscheinen).
‚Antisemitismus und „Deutsche Arbeit“: Zur Selbstzerstörung des Liberalismus bei Gustav Freytag‘ [Antisemitism and „German Labour“: On the self-destruction of Liberalism in Gustav Freytag‘], in Nicolas Berg (ed.), Kapitalismusdebatten um 1900 – Über antisemitisierende Semantiken des Jüdischen, Leipzig, 2011, pp.261-288.
‘“Prosa der Verhältnisse” und Poesie der Ware. Versöhnte Moderne und Realismus in Gustav Freytags Soll und Haben’, in Florian Krobb (ed.) 150 Jahre Soll und Haben: Studien zu Gustav Freytags kontroversem Roman, Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2005, pp.67-86.
‘Evoking and Revoking Auschwitz: Kosovo, Remembrance and German National Identity’, in Ronit Lentin (ed.) Re-presenting the Shoah for the 21st Century, New York, Oxford: Berghahn, 2004, pp.227-52
‘Engendering airwaves – Zur Konstruktion von Geschlecht im Radio’ (with Dagmar Brunow, Janina Jentz and Regina Mühlhäuser), in Andreas Stuhlmann (ed.) Radio-Kultur und Hör-Kunst. Zwischen Avantgarde und Popularkultur 1923-2001, Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2001, pp.24-38.
Journal articles
‚German Modernity, Barbarous Slavs and Profit-seeking Jews: The Cultural Racism of Nationalist Liberals‘ (with Marcel Stoetzler), Nations and Nationalism 19:4, 2013: 739–760.
‚Allegories of Destruction: ‚The Woman‘ and ‚the Jew‘ in Otto Weininger’s Geschlecht und Charakter‘, Germanic Review 88:2, 2013: 121-149.
‚Threats to modernity, threats of modernity: Racism and antisemitism through the lens of literature’, European Societies 14:2, 2012: 240-258.
‚Introduction to the Special Issue on Racism, Antisemitism and Islamophobia‘ (with Robert Fine and Claudine Attias-Donfut; Introduction to European Societies 14:2, 2012, published as corrigendum in the following issue, European Societies 14:3, 2012: 467-469.
‘Colouring the Invisible: The construction of the “black drug dealer”’, in Birgit Tautz (ed.) Colors 1800/1900/2000: Signs of Ethnic Difference (Amsterdamer Beiträge zur neueren Germanistik, vol. 56), Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2004, pp. 233-54.
‘Gender bending hörbar machen?’ (with Dagmar Brunow, Janina Jentz and Regina Mühlhäuser), testcard 10 (2001), pp.108-121.
Translations
Moishe Postone, ‚Marx neu denken‘, in Rahel Jaeggi and Daniel Loick (eds.), Nach Marx: Philosophie, Kritik, Praxis, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2013 (co-translation).
Moishe Postone, ‚Lukács und die dialektische Kritik des Kapitalismus‘, in Georg Lukács u.a., Verdinglichung, Marxismus, Geschichte. Von der Niederlage der Novemberrevolution zur kritischen Theorie, edited and with an introduction by Markus Bitterolf und Denis Maier, Freiburg: Ça ira, 2012 (with M Dahlmann).
Steve Giles, ‘Realismus nach Modernismus? Fotografie und Darstellung bei Kracauer und Brecht’, in Stefan Neuhaus (ed.), Realistisches Schreiben in der Weimarer Republik, Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2006.
Moishe Postone, ‘Nach dem Holocaust. Geschichte und Identität in Westdeutschland’, in Moishe Postone, Deutschland, die Linke und der Holocaust – Politische Interventionen (ed. by initative kritische geschichtspolitik), Freiburg: Ça ira, 2005.
Steve Giles, ‘Dialog über Schauspielkunst’, in Jan Knopf (ed.) Brecht-Handbuch. Band 4. Schriften, Journale, Briefe, Stuttgart: Metzler, 2003, pp.46-48.