IBC People

Deborah Holmes is Assistant Professor in Modern German Literature at the University of Salzburg. She is currently writing a book on figurations and concepts of genius in the long 19th century, with a special focus on the theories of creativity developed by women’s movements in fin-de-siècle Vienna.  Her DPhil from the University of Oxford was awarded for a comparative study of German and Italian émigrés in interwar Zurich, Ignazio Silone in Exile. Writing and Antifascism in Switzerland 1929-1944 (2005). As researcher at the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute in Vienna, she completed a study on the pedagogue, philanthropist and journalist Eugenie Schwarzwald entitled Langeweile ist Gift. Das Leben der Eugenie Schwarzwald (2012). She has held research fellowships at the Queen’s College, Oxford, the Internationales Forschungszentrum Kulturwissenschaften in Vienna, and the University of Munich (as Theodor Heuss Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation). Since 2014, she has been general editor of the MHRA yearbook Austrian Studies. As Sylvia Naish Visiting Fellow, Deborah will be affiliated with the Ingeborg Bachmann Centre for Austrian Literature & Culture, and her time will be divided between comparative research on fin-de-siècle feminist periodicals in Austria-Hungary and Britain, and the planning of a series of events to take place at the IBC in 2023 to mark the 50th anniversary of Bachmann’s death. [January-June 2022]

Marlen Mairhofer read German Language and Literature at the Paris Lodron University Salzburg (PLUS) from 2009 to 2015. Following her graduation, she was a Teaching Fellow at the German Department at PLUS and a Research Assistant at the Salzburg Stefan Zweig Centre. From April to October 2018, she held the Marie-Andeßner Fellowship, awarded by PLUS to outstanding doctoral students, and since then has continued work on her doctorate on the body and writing in Ingeborg Bachmann, Marlen Haushofer and Hélène Cixous whilst serving as University Assistant for Modern German Literature at PLUS. Mairhofer was a Visiting Research Student at the German Department of the University of Durham from January to March 2020. Her research interests include literature and psychoanalysis, feminist and deconstructive (literary) theory, 20th- and 21st-century Austrian literature. She is active in literary societies in Salzburg, and has organised readings, workshops and exhibitions, as well as editing the literary magazine mosaik. Mairhofer has won prizes for her own writing, which has been published in anthologies and the magazines Sterz, Salz and Die Rampe, and broadcast by Austrian State Radio Ö1. [April-June 2022]