Skip to main content

Research

German Studies Research Cluster
Director: Dr. David Robb

The research profile of German Studies spans literature and culture from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century and is underpinned to a great extent by an interdisciplinary approach. This is evident in our investigation of text and language in its relationship to various artistic forms and practices, and in our analysis of cultural production in different political and historical contexts.

The current RAE cycle has seen the departure of two senior colleagues, Uecker and Marten-Finnis, who secured chairs in Nottingham and Portsmouth respectively. Queen’s responded to this in 2006 by investing in two new-blood appointments, Creighton and Pajevic. These, alongside the DAAD Lektorin, Seifert, now join with Robb to complete the current German research unit. The decision by Queen’s to rebuild German Studies is highly significant and indicates the university’s commitment to the subject as an integral part of the School of Languages, Literatures and Performing Arts.

We aim to strike a balance between having a coherent research profile in terms of our broad interest in literature and culture, and creating a sense of identity in terms of developing specific projects, both within the unit and externally. All researchers are literary specialists working on texts from a variety of theoretical perspectives, but with a dominant focus in the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Within this broad “literary” strand, the cluster’s research also draws on theatre, song and cinema (Robb), the visual arts and cultural theory (Creighton), poetry and poetics (Pajevic) and children’s literature (Seifert).

A key element of our research culture is the series of German research seminars, where both internal and external speakers are invited to give papers. These have continued in Spring 2007 with invited papers by international speakers Stuart Taberner (Leeds), Christa Grimm (Leipzig), Andreas Kramer (Goldsmiths) and Gert Hoffmann (Cork).

We have also hosted international conferences. As well as two conferences in German Jewish Studies organised by Marten-Finnis, Robb organised the successful international conference “Clowns, Fools and Picaros in Literature, Drama and Film” at Queen’s in September 2003. This featured over 30 speakers and performers from the UK, Germany, Bangladesh, Nigeria, Israel, Greece and the USA. It included ground-breaking research in this area examining amongst other things the possibilities of the clown in a postmodern, globalised era.

Three international research networks are currently in the planning stages: Pajevic in poetics, and Robb in Political Song and Clown Figures.

Click below on staff names for links to their home pages where you will find details of current research and publications.

David Robb
Marko Pajevic
Nicola Creighton
Martina Seifert