Project Leadership and Partners

Dr Clare Bielby (Senior Lecturer, Centre for Women's Studies, York)

Clare Bielby has worked extensively on the subject of political violence, representation and gender in German Culture and beyond. She is the author of Violent Women in Print: Representations in the West German Print Media of the 1960s and 1970s (Camden House, 2012) and co-editor (with Dr Jeffrey Murer) of the collected volume of essays Perpetrating Selves: Doing Violence, Performing Identity (Palgrave, 2018) and (with Anna Richards) of Women and Death 3: Women's Representations of Death in German Culture since 1500 (Camden House, 2010).

Dr Mererid Puw Davies (Senior Lecturer, Department of German, University College London)

Mererid Puw Davies’s research covers modern German literature from the eighteenth century to the present day, German film and cultural studies, and comparative literature. She is interested in gender issues and women as writers and producers of culture. She has also worked extensively on violence and representation, political writing, and the complex relationships between art, literature, theory and history, especially during and after the violence and atrocities of the twentieth century. In different ways, all these interests are reflected in Mererid's current work in progress on the representation of the Vietnam War in German poetry, which offers a complex and significant engagement with ‘violence elsewhere’, which in turn, illuminates ideas about violence closer to home. Mererid is also deeply and increasingly interested in comparative approaches to the literatures and cultures of modern Europe.

Dr Katharina Karcher (Lecturer, Department of Modern Languages, University of Birmingham)

Katharina Karcher is Lecturer in German at the University of Birmingham. Her research focuses on feminist theory, European women’s movements and the history and memory of political protest, extremism and violence. Her monograph Sisters in Arms? Militant Feminisms in the Federal Republic of Germany since 1968 (Berghahn, 2017) analyses the role of confrontational and violent tactics in three major feminist struggles in post-Second World War Germany: the movement against the abortion ban, the struggle against violence against women and a solidarity campaign for women workers in the Third World. A German edition of the book was published in 2018 by Assoziation A.

Dr Katherine Stone (Assistant Professor, School of Modern Languages and Cultures, University of Warwick)

Katie Stone is an Assistant Professor in German Studies at the University of Warwick. She works closely on the impact of gender on conceptualizations of violence. Her first monograph Women and National Socialism in Postwar German Literature: Gender, Memory, and Subjectivity (2017) examines emotional and cultural barriers to understanding the full extent of women’s complicity in the Third Reich. She continues to be interested in the uses and usefulness of gender as a "category of historical analysis" (to quote Joan W. Scott) in recent research on female perpetrators and on the representation of such women in literature and film. She is currently developing a larger research project on the cultural memory of wartime rape in post-1945 Germany, which will draw on theories of affect in order to investigate how the reception of difficult histories shifts over time and, ultimately, to illuminate how societies produce knowledge about individual and collective trauma.

Dr Birga Meyer (Museum Curator, Museum Friedland / Die Exponauten, Friedland / Berlin)

Birga Meyer specialized in Contemporary European History, Cultural History and Museum Studies and works both in academia and within the museum field. In her academic work she analyzes how the Holocaust and its aftermath is represented within museum exhibitions, while investigating different ways to represent violence in her own curatorial work. Currently, she is responsible for the enlargement of the Museum Friedland, a museum about migration to Germany caused by violence elsewhere. Here, among many other things, she is concerned with the question how wars, political persecution, racial, sexual and religious discriminations, flight and expulsion can be shown in a museum in Germany.

Dr Elizabeth Stewart (Lecturer, Modern Languages, Culture, and Society, King's College London)

Lizzie Stewart is a Lecturer in Modern Languages, Culture and Society at King’s College London. Her research explores cultures of migration, with a focus on theatre and performance. Recent publications have appeared in the Journal of Aesthetics & Culture, Oxford German Studies, and Türkisch-deutsche Studien [Turkish-German Studies] (see also https://kcl.academia.edu/LizzieStewart).

Current research interests include: the relationship between storytelling in theatre, film or prose, and national or transnational narratives of belonging after 9/11; the influence of cultural policy and funding structures on the aesthetic product in contemporary European theatre. Within the ‘Violence Elsewhere’ project, Lizzie is interested in exploring the ways in which the act of locating violence ‘elsewhere’ is variously employed, denied, and narrativized in a context where one in four residents of Germany have a background of post-war migration.

Dr Susanne Knittel (University of Utrecht)

Susanne Knittel is Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. In her research, she explores questions of memory, commemoration, and cultural amnesia; the figure of the perpetrator and the politics of memory; and the relationship between memory studies, disability studies, and posthumanism. She is the author of The Historical Uncanny: Disability, Ethnicity, and the Politics of Holocaust Memory (Fordham UP, 2015; German translation Unheimliche Geschichte: Grafeneck, Triest, und die Politik der Holocaust-Erinnerung, Transcript 2018). She is the editor, with Kári Driscoll, of “Memory after Humanism,” a special issue of Parallax (2017) and, with Zachary Goldberg, of The Routledge International Handbook of Perpetrator Studies (2019). She is the founder of the Perpetrator Studies Network and editor-in-chief of JPR: The Journal of Perpetrator Research.

Kathrin Wunderlich, University of Cambridge

Kathrin is a PhD candidate in the section of German & Dutch at the University of Cambridge. Her research examines the impact of violence elsewhere on Germany’s ‘normalisation’ after unification. Focusing on German literary representations of the wars in Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq and the 9/11 terrorist attacks, her project traces processes of political and historical ‘normalisation’ and considers to what extent these emerge as interlinked or correlated.