Maria’s research interests include German Jewish culture and memory on the one hand and contemporary German-language literatures and cultures of (post-)migration on the other. She is also developing an interest in questions of (non-)citizenship.
She published Renegotiating Postmemory. The Holocaust in Contemporary German-Language Jewish Literature in 2020 (Camden House). The book analyses transgenerational, transnational and transmedial approaches to Holocaust memory in a range of important present-day German Jewish authors. It also explores how these authors’ works allow us to revaluate and enhance the hugely popular concept of postmemory in a manner that takes into account the shifting memoryscapes of the 21st century.
Maria’s Leverhulme-project explores the ways in which contemporary German-language literature engages with social and cultural diversity in the face of migration and postmigration. This includes the question of whether and how the medium of literature can help us develop new frameworks for negotiating difference and diversity that go beyond implicitly or explicitly assimilationist and integrationist frameworks. Engaging with a wide range of texts on the so-called refugee crisis as well as on other migrations movements in German post-war history alongside recent theoretical work on cosmopolitanism, community and conviviality, she argues for fiction as a space for counter-hegemonic challenged to belonging and for everyday relationalities.