Sara Jones completed her BA in Modern Languages (French and German) at the University of Bristol in 2003 and her MA and PhD in the Department of German at the University of Nottingham (2004-2008). After a year of teaching in the Department of European Studies at the University of Bath (2008-2009), she was awarded a 3-year Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship, the first two of which were held at the University of Bristol (2009-2011). She joined the University of Birmingham in September 2011 as a Birmingham Fellow, and was appointed cross-College to the Institute of German Studies (POLSIS) and the Department of Modern Languages.

In the Department of Modern Languages, Dr Jones teaches and convenes the module From the Stasi to the Sandmännchen: Remembering the GDR in the United Germany (Final Year) and contributes to Approaches to European Cultures (Year 1).

I currently supervise doctoral research in the fields of memory and memorialisation of the GDR, and notions of EUropeanness in the EU integration process. I am always happy to hear from potential postgraduate students looking to work in my areas of expertise.

Sara Jones is currently completing the project ‘Reconstructing the Stasi: Remembering Secret Police Repression in the United Germany’, funded by the Leverhulme Trust (2009-2012). This has included a series of journal articles, book chapters, and conference papers that consider the representation of the Stasi in different media forms (literature, film, autobiography and museums). In the context of this work, she is completing a monograph with the provisional title: The Media of Testimony: Remembering the East German Stasi in the Berlin Republic. Dr Jones’s research takes an interdisciplinary approach to the processes of remembering dictatorship, combining cultural, media and memory studies with sociology and political science.

Building on this work, Dr Jones is also leading on an initiative bringing together researchers working on memories of state socialist dictatorship from different disciplinary perspectives, and across Eastern Europe. Most recently, she was co-organiser of the international conference, ‘Remembering Dictatorship: State Socialist Pasts in Post-Socialist Presents’ (2011), including a series of public engagement events (theatre performance, literary reading and film showing). She is in the process of developing a comparative project looking at the role and self-perception of memorials in the deepening of democracy in post-socialist Romania and Germany.

Dr Jones’s doctoral research analysed literary production in the GDR and considered the complex and ambiguous position of socialist writers from across the spectrum of conformity and dissent. The thesis takes an interdisciplinary approach to the topic, combining extensive archival research with literary analysis of autobiographical texts and fiction.

Membership of Professional Organisations:

• Association of German Studies in Great Britain and Ireland (panel convenor for 'History and Remembrance')
• Women in German Studies
• German Studies Association

• Single-authored Books

Jones, S. (2011), Complicity, Censorship and Criticism: Negotiating Space in the GDR Literary Sphere, Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. (Interdisciplinary German Cultural Studies).

• Edited Books

Jones, S. and Pinfold, D. (eds) (2014), Remembering Dictatorship: State Socialist Pasts in Post-Socialist Presents – special issue of Central Europe.

Jones, S. and Nehru, M. (eds) (2011), Writing under Socialism, Nottingham: Critical, Cultural and Communications Press. (Studies in Post-Conflict Cultures).

• Journal Articles

Jones, S. (2013), "Memory on Film: Testimony and Constructions of Authenticity in Documentaries about the GDR", European Journal of Cultural Studies (forthcoming). Published online before print 17 December 2012: doi:10.1177/1367549412467180

Jones, S. (2013), "Catching Fleeting Memories: Victim Forums as Mediated Remembering Communities", Memory Studies (forthcoming). Published online before print 23 May 2012: doi: 10.1177/1750698012437830.

Jones, S. (2011), “Staging Battlefields: Media, Authenticity and Politics in The Museum of Communism (Prague), The House of Terror (Budapest) and Gedenkstätte Hohenschönhausen (Berlin)”, Journal of War and Culture Studies, 4.1: 97-111.

Jones, S. (2011), “Touching on Taboos: Elfriede Brüning and the Reception of Partnerinnen in the GDR”, German Life and Letters, 64.1: 71-82.

Jones, S. (2009), “Conflicting Evidence: Hermann Kant and the Opening of the Stasi Files”, German Life and Letters, 62.2: 190-205.

• Book Chapters

Jones, S. (2012), "Why Stay? Shifting Perspectives on 'Inner Emigration' and Resistance in the Works of Elfriede Brüning". In Clarke, D. and Goodbody, A. (eds), The Self in Transition: East German Autobiographical Writing Before and After Unification. Essays in Honour of Dennis Tate, Amsterdam: Rodopi, pp. 71-84

Jones, S. (2012),“Community and Genre: Autobiographical Rememberings of Stasi Oppression”. In Saunders, A. and Pinfold, D. (eds), Remembering and Rethinking the GDR: Multiple Perspectives and Plural Authenticities, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 67-82.

Jones, S. (2011), "Writing in Ambiguity: Negotiating Censorship in the GDR". In Jones, S. and Nehru, M. (eds), Writing under Socialism, Nottingham: Critical, Cultural and Communications Press, pp. 11-27.

Jones, S. (2011), “At Home with the Stasi: Gedenkstätte Hohenschönhausen as Historic House”. In Clarke, D. And Wölfel, U. (eds), Remembering the German Democratic Republic: Divided Memory in a United Germany, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 211-22.

Jones, S. (2010), “‘Ein reines Phantasieprodukt’ or ‘Hostile Biography’? – Günter de Bruyn’s Vierzig Jahre and the Stasi files”. In Dahlke, B., Tate, D. and Woods, R. (eds), German Life Writing in the Twentieth Century, Rochester, NY: Camden House, pp. 196-207.

Jones, S. (2010), "Wie man 'das Gruseln' lernt: Stefan Heym, Autobiographie und die Stasi-Akten’. In Preusser, H.-P. and Schmitz, H. (eds), Autobiographie und historische Krisenerfahrung. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, pp. 117-26

• Review Articles

(with Martin Modlinger) 'German Studies: Literature and Film, 1945 to the Present Day', The Year's Work in Modern Language Studies 2012, 74 (in preparation)

(with Catriona Firth) ‘German Studies: Literature and Film, 1945 to the Present Day’, The Year’s Work in Modern Language Studies 2011, 73 (in press)

(with Catriona Firth) ‘German Studies, Literature and Film 1945 to the Present Day’, The Year’s Work in Modern Language Studies 2010, 72: 432-58.