Sofia Cumming
Sylvia Naish Visiting Research Fellow
October–December 2024
Profile
Sofia Cumming is currently a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures at King’s College London, where she was previously Lecturer in German (2023–24). She has also held positions as an Associate Lecturer in German at the University of St Andrews (2022–23) and as an Associate Tutor in Literature at the University of East Anglia (2018–22), where she completed her CHASE-funded PhD. Her research centres on transnational and comparative approaches to modern Germanophone literature and culture, with a particular focus on the convergence of German and French intellectual traditions. Her doctoral thesis, 'Walter Benjamin’s Parisian Passages: Correspondences in European Thought', examines Benjamin’s life-long engagement with French literary and aesthetic culture, highlighting his role as an intermediary in Franco-German intellectual exchanges of the interwar period. She was formerly a DAAD-funded Visiting Scholar at Humboldt University, Berlin (2020–21) and a Research Affiliate at the Marc Bloch Centre (2020–23). She is a contributor to the edited volume Conformity and Subversion of Literary Collage (Routledge, 2024) and her work has been published in Monatshefte, Recherches Germaniques, lendemains and the Times Literary Supplement. During her Sylvia Naish Fellowship at the ILCS, she will develop her next research project, 'The Transnational Critic', which aims to investigate the ‘transnational’ journalistic writings of German-Jewish critics across the publishing contexts of Weimar Germany, France and the US (1921–59).