Research
Kirstin Gwyer’s research interests are in comparative twentieth- and twenty-first-century literature, with a particular focus on Holocaust and Jewish literature, Afro-German, Black and postcolonial literature, aftermath writing, literary theory, and intersections between literature and science. She is currently writing a book on Kafka’s intertextual afterlife in works by authors and theorists responding to human limit experiences: genocide, (post)colonialism, racism, terrorism, environmental collapse.
Teaching
German translation and German literature from the eighteenth century to the present, with a special interest in modernist, post-1945 and contemporary writing. Prescribed authors offered include Thomas Mann, Kafka and Bachmann. Graduate supervision in German and Comparative Literature across a range of areas related to research interests.
Publications
‘Planetarity in the Global? Modern Jewish Literature in English’, in Disseminating Jewish Literatures: Knowledge, Research, Curricula, ed. by Ruth Fine, Natasha Gordinsky, Kader Konuk, Claudia Olk, Galili Shahar, and Susanne Zepp (Berlin, Boston: de Gruyter Mouton, 2020)
‘In the Shadow of No Memories? The Role of Dementia in Contemporary Aftermath Writing’, in Violent Memories: The Politics of Dementia in Contemporary Literature, Film and Comics, ed. by Irmela Marei Krüger-Fürhoff, Nina Schmidt and Sue Vice (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2020)
‘Gynter Grass bald anders: Taking the Self out of Autobiography in Grass’s Beim Häuten der Zwiebel’, Oxford German Studies, 48.3 (2019), 328-45
‘H. G. Adler’s “Grenzgängertum”: Trans-Border Travel between Enlightenment Epistemology and Modernist Representation’, in A Modernist in Exile: The International Reception of H. G. Adler, ed. by Lynn L. Wolff (Cambridge: Legenda, 2019)
Giving up the Ghost: The Haunting of Modern Culture, ed. with Karen Leeder (in prep. for Palgrave Macmillan)
‘“You think your writing belongs to you?”: Intertextuality in Contemporary Jewish Post-Holocaust Literature’, Humanities 7.1 (2018), 20 (1-18). doi:10.3390/h7010020
‘Beyond Lateness? “Postmemory” and the Late(st) German-Language Family Novel’, in Figuring Lateness: Lateness, Belatedness and Late Style in Modern German Culture, ed. by Karen Leeder (= New German Critique 125 (2015)), 137-53
‘”Schmerzensspuren der Geschichte(n)”: Memory and Intertextuality in H. G. Adler and W. G. Sebald, in Memory, Witnessing, Poetics: H. G. Adler and W. G. Sebald, ed. by Helen Finch and Lynn L. Wolff (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2014), 112-36
Encrypting the Past: The German-Jewish Holocaust Novel of the First Generation (Oxford: OUP, 2014)
