Background

I hold an MA and a doctorate in German and Philosophy from the University of Oxford (New College). When I first graduated I worked for Deutsche Bank in Frankfurt before returning to Oxford to write a doctoral thesis. I held a Junior Research Fellowship at Jesus College, Oxford and a Humboldt Research Fellowship in Germany. I was a Lecturer in Modern Languages at the University of St Andrews for ten years before coming to Birmingham in 2005.

Teaching

I teach the German language at all levels and aspects of modern German culture, including Schiller, Nietzsche, First World War writing, Thomas Mann, and National Socialism and its legacies. I also teach in a variety of European Studies programmes outside the Department of German Studies, at both undergraduate and postgraduate level.

Research interests

• 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.

I welcome applications from prospective postgraduate students keen to work on these or other aspects of German culture of the period c. 1870 to c. 1945.

Postgraduate research topics I have supervised to successful completion include:

• ‘Masculinity and the fantastic in the fiction of Irmtraud Morgner’;
• ‘Bildung and Initiation: Interpreting German and American Narrative Traditions’;
• ‘Norm, deviance and madness in German literature 1770-1850’;
• ‘Reception of the Nibelungenlied in Germany, 1945-1960’;
• ‘Representations of the Wehrmacht in GDR antifascist literature 1950-1957’;
• ‘Memory, Identity, Historiography: The Renovation of the “Museumsinsel” in Berlin, 1998-2009’;
• ‘The Politics of Anglo-German Academic Exchange, 1919-1932’.

Conferences

I co-organised a major international conference at the Institute of Germanic and Romance Studies in London on 27-28 November 2008 to mark the centenary of the publication of Nietzsche's Ecce Homo.

I also organised the 7th Annual Conference of the Friedrich Nietzsche Society ('Nietzsche and the German Tradition') in St Andrews in 1997, and in 2005 I organised 'Schiller: National Poet - Poet of Nations', a two-day symposium at Birmingham with 15 invited speakers, to mark the 200th anniversary of Schiller's death.

Research groups

I am a member of the Centres for First World War and Second World War Studies at Birmingham.

Other activities

General Editor, Forum for Modern Language Studies

Director, Graduate Centre for Europe at Birmingham

Director of Postgraduate Studies, School of Languages, Cultures, Art History and Music

Convenor, Modern European Cultures MA/MPhil(B) programme

Member of International Editorial Board, Journal of War and Culture Studies

Publications

Books

(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 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), 367-80.

‘Nietzsche’s “Schillerbild”: A Re-evaluation’, German Life and Letters 48 (1995), 516-39.

‘“Wie ich von Wagner loskam”’, Nietzscheforschung 2 (1995), 257-63.

‘“We Good Europeans”: Nietzsche’s New Europe in Beyond Good and Evil’, History of European Ideas 20 (1995), 141-44.

‘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), 131-40.

Chapters in books

'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. 275-99.

‘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. 263-86.

‘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. 239-54.

‘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).

See also Research Showcase