Professor Sara Jones

• PhD in German 2009
• MA by Research (German) 2005
• BA in Modern Languages (French and German) 2003
• PCAP (Postgraduate Certificate in Academic Practice) 2013

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 for German Studies (POLSIS) and the Department of Modern Languages. Since September 2018, she has held the post of Professor in the Department of Modern Languages.

Professor Jones currently teaches on Core modules in German language and literature in Year 1 and Year 4. She also contributes to the MA module ‘World Literatures Compared.’ In previous years, she has contributed to Approaches to European Cultures (Year 1), Texts in Context (Year 1), Contemporary Germany (Year 1), Holocaust and Genocide: Comparative and Interdisciplinary Perspectives (MA) and was convenor for From the Stasi to the Sandmännchen: Remembering the GDR in the United Germany (Final Year). She also supervises undergraduate Independent Study Projects.

Professor Jones is always happy to hear from potential postgraduate students looking to work in her areas of expertise (the political, social and cultural processes of remembering state socialist dictatorship).

Professor Jones currently supervises six doctoral research projects:

Jonathan Conde (with Klaus Richter): An examination of Lithuanian nationalism

Matthew Hines (Wolfson Foundation, with Ute Hirsekorn (Nottingham) and Mónica Jato): Writing a New Society: ‘Aufbau’ in East German Literature 1945-1955

George Gibson (with Corey Ross): Letters without signatures: An analysis of the anonymous letters written by citizens of the German Democratic Republic to the BBC German Service circa the construction of the Berlin Wall, 1960-1962

Ivor Bolton (with Jonathan Grix): The Implementation of German Heritage Policy and the Representation of "Inner Unity" through Memorials and Museums

Ilaria Bernardi (AHRC, with Scott Lucas): Visiting the United States and Bringing It Back Home: the US Exchange Programs with Germany and Italy, 1950-1965

Mia Parkes (AHRC, with Mónica Jato and Alison Ribeiro de Menezes): Reconceptualising the Female Political Prisoner: 100 Years of Women's Imprisonment

Completed PhD Supervisions

Maren Rohe (DAAD, with Julian Pänke): Constructing the Other: Polish and Russian Perceptions of Germany between Media Influence and Individuality. Viva passed in April 2019

Alexander Brown (AHRC, with Joanne Sayner): Rethinking the GDR Opposition: Reform, Resistance and Revolution in the Other Germany. Viva passed in March 2019

Marlene Schrijnders (AHRC, with Joanne Sayner): From London to Leipzig and Back: Post-Punk, Endzeit and Ostgoth. Viva passed in February 2019

David Zell (AHRC, with Joanne Sayner): Major Cultural Commemorations and the Construction of Cultural and Political Identity in the GDR, 1967-1987. Viva passed in January 2018.

Josefin Graef (DAAD, with Isabelle Hertner): The Dynamics of Narrating Criminal Violence: The National Socialist Underground and the (Re-) Negotiation of Germanness. Viva passed in December 2016

Leila Mukhida (DAAD, with Elystan Griffiths): Politics and the Moving Image: Contemporary German and Austrian Cinema Through the Lens of Benjamin, Kracauer and Kluge. Viva passed in January 2015

She has also supervised MA Dissertations in the MA Holocaust and Genocide, on representations of the GDR opposition in state-mandated memory, GDR samizdat publications, Romanian and Bulgarian immigration to the UK and Germany, and women’s prison writing in Franco’s Spain.

She is always happy to hear from potential postgraduate students looking to work in her areas of expertise.

Find out more - our PhD German Studies  page has information about doctoral research at the University of Birmingham.

Sara 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. This work was published in 2011 as a monograph in de Gruyter’s Interdisciplinary German Cultural Studies series with the title: Complicity, Censorship and Criticism: Negotiating Space in the GDR Literary Sphere.

Professor Jones’s second major project, "Reconstructing the Stasi: Remembering Secret Police Repression in the United Germany", was funded by the Leverhulme Trust (2009-2012). This 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). The research culminated in a monograph in Palgrave Macmillan's Memory Studies series with the title: The Media of Testimony: Remembering the East German Stasi in the Berlin Republic (August 2014). Professor 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 the work of her second monograph, Professor Jones was Principal Investigator for the AHRC network “Culture and its Uses of Testimony”, which ran from July 2016-January 2019. The network brought together scholars from across the humanities and social sciences with non-academic practitioners to consider what role cultural forms of testimony (e.g., autobiographical writing, literature, art, film, documentary and museums) can play in processes of post-conflict reconciliation and justice. For more information see the project website. The network led to a major AHRC-funded follow-on project “Testimony in Practice”, which runs from March 2019-February 2020. The project comprises: an innovative documentary theatre production, made in a collaboration with Catalan theatre company La Conquesta del Pol Sud and Romanian and German novelist Carmen-Francesca Banciu; an online testimonies campaign to collect the stories of Central and Eastern Europeans living in the UK; a co-operation with Central and Eastern European arts space, Centrala, to produce a sound-art installation based on the testimonies; and a series of workshops (youth artist, theatre practitioner, creative writing).

Professor Jones is CI on the major AHRC-funded research project “Knowing the Secret Police: Secrecy and Knowledge in East German Society”. This project overturns the approach of existing research to ask not what the "all-powerful" Stasi knew about society, but what and how East Germans knew about the secret police. It also includes a significant impact dimension working with political foundations, archives, museums and schools. Professor Jones explores literary networks and representations), the PI is Anselma Gallinat (Newcastle, looking at church and social networks) and Joanne Sayner (also Newcastle) is the second CI (looking at political networks). The project started in October 2018 and will run for three years.

Professor Jones is currently developing a new project looking at how memories of dictatorship are negotiated across borders in political, cultural and social processes. She is particularly interested in the concept of relationality and how this can inform our understanding of transnational co-operation. As part of this, she is working with techniques drawn from Social Network Analysis (SNA) to track cross-border collaborations of German memory-political institutions and combining this quantitative research with qualitative analysis to assess the meanings given to such co-operations by the actors involved and the ways in which these activities are used to construct new narratives about the past. Through the empirical work she is refining the new theoretical concept of “collaborative memory”. The final results of the research will be published in a monograph with the provisional title: Towards a Collaborative Memory: German Memory Work in a Transnational Context.

Professor Jones is Deputy Head of Research and Impact Officer for the School of Languages, Cultures, Art History and Music. She is also Research Lead for the Department of Modern Languages.

She is s General Editor (Forum Prize) for the journal Forum for Modern Language Studies and member of the editorial board of the Journal of Perpetrator Research.

Membership of Professional Organisations:

• Association of German Studies in Great Britain and Ireland
• Women in German Studies
• Memory Studies Association