MA, DPhil (University of Oxford)

I teach the German language at all levels as well as German cultural and intellectual history from the Enlightenment to the Second World War, with a particular focus on Schiller, Nietzsche, First World War writing, Thomas Mann, and National Socialism and its legacies. 

I also teach on a variety of European Studies programmes, at both undergraduate and postgraduate level.

I welcome applications from prospective postgraduate students wishing to research any aspect of German intellectual and cultural history from the Enlightenment to the present day. 

I am currently supervising six PhD projects:

• Shakespeare and German Reunification: The Interface of Politics and Performance
• Nietzsche, Goethe and Nineteenth-Century Traditions of Bildung
• The Son as Adam and Christ: Literary uses of biblical imagery in Hartmann von Aue’s Gregorius, Kafka’s Die Verwandlung and Thomas Mann’s Der Erwählte
• The Creative and Critical Power of the Aphorism in Nietzsche and Hohl
• Venice, Eros and Art in representative German and Italian texts
• A Comparative Investigation of the Portrayal of Cyclical Time in T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and Thomas Mann’s Der Zauberberg

PhD and Master’s theses I have supervised to successful completion include:

• Bildung and Initiation: Interpreting German and American Narrative Traditions
• Norm, deviance and madness in German literature 1770-1850
• Myths of War: Constructing and Challenging Literary Myths of the First World War in Germany
• A study of appropriations of Nietzsche in the Weimar Republic’
• The Politics of Anglo-German Academic Exchange, 1919-1932’
• Reception of the Nibelungenlied in Germany, 1945-1960’
• Representations of the Wehrmacht in GDR antifascist literature 1950-1957
• Masculinity and the fantastic in the fiction of Irmtraud Morgner
• Memory, Identity, Historiography: The Renovation of the “Museumsinsel” in Berlin, 1998-2009

• Schiller
• Nietzsche's thought and its reception
• Thomas Mann's cultural and political criticism
• The First World War in German culture and memory
• National Socialism and German culture.

Research groups

• Security and Conflict Hub
• Centre for War Studies

Conferences organised

• Aftermath: Legacies and Memories of War in Europe, 1918-1945-1989, University of Birmingham, September 2010. Keynote speakers: Jay Winter (Yale), Mary Fulbrook (UCL).
• ‘Nietzsche’s “Ecce Homo” – A Centenary Conference’, Institute of Germanic & Romance Studies, London, November 2008
• 'Schiller: National Poet - Poet of Nations', University of Birmingham, June 2005
• 'Nietzsche and the German Tradition', Friedrich Nietzsche Society Conference, University of St Andrews, 1997

Other academic responsibilities and activities

• General Editor, Forum for Modern Language Studies
• Editorial Board member of Publications of the English Goethe Society and Journal of War and Culture Studies

• (Ed. with Jeffrey L. High and Norbert Oellers) Who Is This Schiller Now? Essays on His Reception and Significance (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2011).
• (Ed.) Schiller: National Poet – Poet of Nations. A Birmingham Symposium, Amsterdamer Beiträge zur neueren Germanistik, 61 (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2006).
• (Ed.) Literary Reflections of Modern War (Special Issue of Forum for Modern Language Studies), FMLS, 41 (2005), no. 2.
• (Ed.) Nietzsche and the German Tradition (Oxford and Berne: Lang, 2003).
• Nietzsche and Schiller: Untimely Aesthetics, Oxford Modern Languages and Literatures Monographs (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996); reprinted 1998.

Articles in peer-reviewed journals

• ‘Nietzsche’s Goethe: In Sickness and in Health’, Publications of the English Goethe Society, 77 (2008), 113–124.
• ‘“Aufklärung und kein Ende”’: The Place of Enlightenment in Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thought’, German Life and Letters, 61 (2008), 79-97.
• ‘“Ewig verbundene Geister”: Thomas Mann’s Re-engagement with Nietzsche, 1943-1947’, Oxford German Studies, 34 (2005), 197-203.
• ‘“Fighting a Philosophy”: The Figure of Nietzsche in British Propaganda of the First World War’, Modern Language Review, 98 (2003), 367-380.
• ‘Nietzsche’s “Schillerbild”: A Re-evaluation’, German Life and Letters 48 (1995), 516-539.
• ‘“Wie ich von Wagner loskam”’, Nietzscheforschung 2 (1995), 257-263.
• ‘“We Good Europeans”: Nietzsche’s New Europe in Beyond Good and Evil’, History of European Ideas 20 (1995), 141-144.
• ‘Nietzsche under fire’, Times Literary Supplement, 5 August 1994, 11-12.
• ‘Retying the Gordian Knot: Nietzsche and the Nineteenth Century’, Journal of Nietzsche Studies, 6 (1993), 131-140.

Chapters in books

• ‘The Reluctant Recruit? Schiller in the Trenches, 1914–1918’, in Who Is This Schiller Now? Essays on His Reception and Significance, ed. Jeffrey L. High, Nicholas Martin and Norbert Oellers (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2011), pp. 351-366.
• 'Playing with the Rules: Schiller's Experiments in Short Prose Fiction, 1782-1789', in Schiller's Literary Prose Works: New Translations and Critical Essays, ed. Jeffrey L. High (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2008), pp. 188-201.
• 'Thomas Mann's Mario und der Zauberer: "Simply a Story of Human Affairs"', in The Text and Its Context: Studies in Modern German Literature and Society Presented to Ronald Speirs on the Occasion of his 65th Birthday, ed. Nigel Harris and Joanne Sayner (Oxford and Berne: Peter Lang, 2008), pp. 165-176.
• ‘Introduction: Schiller After Two Centuries’, in Schiller: National Poet – Poet of Nations. A Birmingham Symposium, ed. Nicholas Martin (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2006), pp. 7-21.
• ‘Images of Schiller in National Socialist Germany’, in Schiller: National Poet – Poet of Nations. A Birmingham Symposium, ed. Nicholas Martin (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2006), pp. 275-299.
• ‘Inviting Barbarism: Nietzsche’s Will to Russia’, in Germany and the Imagined East, ed. Lee M. Roberts (London: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2005), pp. 80-93.
• ‘Nietzsche in the GDR: History of a Taboo’, in Nietzsche and the German Tradition, ed. Nicholas Martin (Oxford and Berne: Lang, 2003), pp. 263-286.
• ‘Thomas Manns Nietzsche im Lichte der eigenen Erfahrung: Einkehr, Abrechnung, Selbstkritik’, in Thomas Mann (1875–1955), ed. Walter Delabar and Bodo Plachta (Berlin: Weidler, 2005), pp. 239-254.
• ‘Breeding Greeks: Nietzsche, Gobineau and Classical Theories of Race’. In: Nietzsche and Antiquity: His Reaction and Response to the Classical Tradition, ed. Paul Bishop (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2004), pp. 40-53.
• ‘Extremes of Nietzsche: “Wo sind die Barbaren des 20. Jahrhunderts?”’, in Ecce Opus. Nietzsche-Revisionen im 20. Jahrhundert, ed. Rüdiger Görner and Duncan Large (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2003), pp. 25-35.

Translation

• Gianni Vattimo, Nietzsche: An Introduction (Stanford: Stanford University Press; London: Athlone Press, 2002)