EXILE Centre People

Ellen Pilsworth is Lecturer in German and Translation Studies at the University of Reading. Her research project ‘Knowing the Nazis, Inside and Out: Anti-Fascist Publishing in Austria, Germany and Britain, 1927-40’ has been funded by the British Academy since 2020. From September to December 2023, Ellen will pursue this research at the Research Centre for German & Austrian Exile Studies supported by a Martin Miller and Hannah Norbert-Miller Fellowship. She is now turning this project into a monograph, provisionally entitled 'Atrocity Stories: Anti-Nazi Refugee Autobiographies for British Readers in the Years of Appeasement and War (1933-45)'. Her previous research and doctoral thesis (conducted at University College London) explored 18th-century German literature and culture, especially German romanticism and nationalism. She is co-editor (with Dagmar Paulus, 2020) of the volume Nationalism before the Nation State: Literary Constructions of Inclusion, Exclusion and Self-Definition (1756-1871), and has published several articles in Oxford German Studies, German Life and Letters, Publications of the English Goethe Society, and The Journal of Perpetrator Research. Her latest publication is 'How the Social Structures of Nazi Germany Created a Bystander Society' (The Conversation UK, January 2024). [September-December 2023]

Áine McGillicuddy is Assistant Professor in German and Children's /Young Adult Literature Studies at Dublin City University. Since completing her doctoral thesis on politics and cultural identity in the works of bilingual Alsatian writer René Schickele (1883-1940) at Trinity College Dublin, she has focused on child exile narratives spanning the Nazi era to the present day. She is co-editor of Politics and Ideology in Children's Literature (2014) and has published articles and book chapters on literary and visual portrayals of child exiles’ experiences. Áine was the recipient of a German Foreign Ministry 3-month research fellowship at the International Youth Library, Munich in 2014. For over ten years, she was a committee member of the Irish Society for the Study of Children's Literature (ISSCL) and the Irish branch of the International Board on Books for Young People (IBBY). From 2017 to 2020, she was Director of the Research Centre for Translation and Textual Studies at Dublin City University. She became the Irish representative on the Women in German Studies committee (UK and Ireland) in May 2022. During her Martin Miller and Hannah Norbert-Miller Visiting Fellowship, she conducted research for her project entitled ‘Fact and Fiction: Child Exile Narratives for a Juvenile Readership in the 21st century’. [April 2023]

Till Greite is an early career researcher, a member of the Berlin-based PhD-Net ‘The Knowledge of Literature’ and a researcher in Princeton University’s Goethe-project. His doctoral thesis, completed at the Humboldt University Berlin, entitled ‘Die leere Zentrale. Berlin, ein Bild aus dem deutschen Nachkrieg. Eine literaturgeschichtliche Begehung’, focuses on literary Berlin between the 1930s and 1960s, notably on authors of the so-called ‘Lost Generation’ seen from both sides: the exiled authors and writers of the ‘inner emigration’. During his Martin Miller and Hannah Norbert-Miller Visiting Scholarship at the Centre for German & Austrian Exile Studies, he will work on a follow-up research project about the Berlin-born British poet, translator and critic Michael Hamburger, who came to the UK as a refugee in 1933 at the age of nine. Hamburger was to become one of the key figures in mediating German and Austrian literature in the UK and the English-speaking world. Entitled ‘Michael Hamburger and the “No man’s land of languages”’, the project centres on Hamburger’s idea of a ‘phenomenology of exile’, which he developed in his critical writings. The theoretical focus will be accompanied by archival research on the Michael Hamburger Archive held at the British Library. In connection with his research on German exile Greite also re-edited the principal work of the novelist, and friend of Walter Benjamin, Wilhelm Speyer’s 1947 novel Das Glück der Andernachs (Lilienfeld, 2024). His wider research interests are in the theoretical field of phenomenology, hermeneutics and philosophical anthropology in which he has published articles on Max Scheler, Hans-Georg Gadamer and Hans Blumenberg.  

Dolors Sabaté is Professor of Modern and Contemporary German Literature at the University of Santiago de Compostela. She received her PhD from the University of Barcelona and her current research focuses on literature written in German by exiled women from a gender and cultural perspective. She has taught as a Lecturer at the University of Bamberg and has been a Visiting Professor at the Universities of Krakow, Lecce, Freiburg and the EPHE in Paris. She has been a DAAD Fellow and runs the projects of the inter-university network Vitruvia, including ExFemLiOn, an autobiographical content repository of exiled German-language women writers. Her research as a Martin Miller and Hannah Norbert-Miller Visiting Fellow focuses on Erna Pinner (1890-1987), graphic artist, photographer, painter and writer, especially known in the artistic and intellectual context of Germany of the 1920s. Pinner undertook numerous trips throughout Europe, Africa and Latin America. Her travel experiences are included in Pinner's early work which is clearly influenced by the ideas of Social Darwinism. During her exile in London, Pinner became an illustrator of works of popular science, being herself the author of this type of work – Curious Creatures (1953) and Born Alive (1959). The aim of the research is to verify the dimension of Pinner's ideological discourse in his work in exile.  [June-July 2022]

Kathryn Sederberg is Assistant Professor of German Studies at Kalamazoo College (USA). She received her PhD from the University of Michigan in 2014 for a dissertation entitled ‘Germany’s Rubble Texts: Writing History in the Present, 1943-1951’. Her main research areas include 20th-century German culture, autobiography and memoir, war and gender, and National Socialism and its legacies. She has published on diaries and literature from the Second World War and the post-war period, including an article on hybrid ‘Brieftagebücher’ (letter-diaries) at the war’s end, and on time and history in crisis diaries. As a Martin Miller and Hannah Norbert-Miller Visiting Fellow, she will continue her study of refugee diaries: ‘Journaling Displacement: Jewish Refugee Accounts 1933-1945’. With a focus on the experience of non-prominent German and Austrian Jewish refugees, this project analyses the role of the diary as a site (space, practice) where the writing subject is shaped by processes of acculturation and explores new concepts of self, home, and belonging. [June 2022]

Sam Dolbear completed his PhD at Birkbeck College, University of London, in 2018, where his work formed around a diagram of diasporic friendship, composed by Walter Benjamin in 1932: a representation of a generation fractured by various social, political and economic crises. As a Martin Miller and Hannah Norbert-Miller Visiting Fellow, he will continue this work through the examination of two figures on the diagram: the radio-producer, composer and poet Ernst Schoen (1884-1960) and the physician, sexologist and chiromancer Charlotte Wolff (1897-1986), both of whom settled in London after 1933. The project forms around questions of sensory disintegration in exiled life, through various strains of sonic and haptic modernisms. In addition to this research, he teaches at the University of California, Berkeley, and Skidmore College, and has published and edited extensively including Walter Benjamin: The Storyteller (2016), edited and translated with Esther Leslie and Sebastian Truskolaski and, most recently, three self-published pamphlets on The Arcades Project, co-edited with Hannah Proctor. With a number of others, he has also recently founded MayDay Radio, an audio collective based in London. [September 2019-June 2020]

Anna-Dorothea Ludewig is a researcher at the Moses Mendelssohn Centre for European-Jewish Studies, Potsdam, and Lecturer at the University of Potsdam and the Bundeswehr University, Munich. She has been a member and academic coordinator of the Graduate School ‘MAKOM. Place and Places in Judaism’ and received her PhD from the University of Potsdam in 2007. More recently she was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Regensburg and, in 2016, was Visiting Scholar at Dartmouth College, NH. Since 2010 she has been member of the editorial staff of the online periodical MEDAON – Journal for Jewish Life in Research and Education. She is currently working on a research and book project (Habilitation): ‘Jewesses – Images of Femininity in 20th-Century German Literature’. Recent publications include: [co-ed. with Steffen Höhne] Goethe und die Juden – die Juden und Goethe. Beiträge zu einer Beziehungs- und Rezeptionsgeschichte (2018); [with Elke-Vera Kotowski and Hannah Lotte Lund) Zweisamkeiten. Zwölf außergewöhnliche Paare in Berlin (2016); [co-ed. with Ulrike Brunotte and Axel Stähler] Orientalism, Gender, and the Jews. Literary and Artistic Transformations of European National Discourses (2015). [February 2020]

Gisela Holfter is Senior Lecturer in German and Joint Director of the Centre for Irish-German Studies at the University of Limerick, Ireland. She studied in Cologne, Cambridge and St. Louis. Prior to her appointment in Limerick in 1996, she worked in Dunedin (NZ) and Belfast, Northern Ireland. Her research interests include German-Irish relations; German literature (19th century to contemporary writing); exile studies; intercultural communication and Business German. She is a member of the PEN German-speaking Writers Abroad and has published on Heinrich Böll, Ludwig Hopf, Ernst Lewy, Annette Kolb and Friedrich Engels among others. Her latest book (with Horst Dickel) is An Irish Sanctuary: German-speaking Refugees in Ireland 1933-1945 (2017). During her Martin Miller and Hannah Norbert-Miller Visiting Fellowship, she will pursue her research into the links between British and Irish aid organisations helping German-speaking refugees. [May-June 2018]

Eva-Maria Thüne is Professor of German Language and Linguistics at the University of Bologna; she is also Dean of the International MA Degree Course, 'Language, Society and Communication’. She held a Fellowship at the Bogliasco Foundation in 2008, and at Clare Hall, Cambridge, in 2017. Apart from research in the analysis of spoken language in literature and studies in the field of German as a Foreign Language and German Sociolinguistics, one of her main interests is the interaction of migration and language (mainly from the point of view of the reconstruction of language biographies). For years she has been engaged in research on what is called in German the 'Israel-Korpus. Emigrantendeutsch in Israel', a corpus of interviews with German-speaking refugees (so called 'Jeckes') who settled in Palestine, a project led by Professor Anne Betten of the University of Salzburg between 1989 and 1994. Thüne’s investigations have centred on speech representation in the interviews, the importance of objects in this special form of migration, the representation of identity, metaphors of roots, body experience and identity, and the linguistic expression of grief resulting from loss and separation –  the latter being part of the volume Emotionsausdruck und Erzählstrategien in narrativen Interviews. Analysen zu Gesprächsaufnahmen mit jüdischen Emigranten (ed. with Simona Leonardi and Anne Betten, 2016). During her Martin Miller and Hannah Norbert Miller Visiting Fellowship , she will pursue her research by comparing the interviews she has collected in the UK in 2017 with German-speaking refugees of the pre-war period with the collection of interviews conducted by the Research Centre for German & Austrian Exile Studies which form the basis for the book Changing Countries (2002).  [February-March 2018]

Bettina Brandt received her PhD in Comparative Literature from Harvard University and holds MA degrees in French and German Language and Literature from the University of Utrecht. She taught at Harvard, MIT, Columbia University, Barnard College and Montclair State University before joining the Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literatures at Pennsylvania State University. Brandt has published articles and book chapters on 20th- and 21st-century literature, the literatures and arts of the historical and the neo avant-gardes, literary multilingualism (especially Emine Sevgi Özdamar, Herta Müller, Yoko Tawada); global early modern relations, and recently started working on Austrian-Jewish relations and the Holocaust. Brandt co-edited Herta Müller. Politics and Aesthetics (2013) and China in the German Enlightenment (2016). She is also the co-translator of Yoko Tawada’s De Berghollander (2010) and has translated a dozen shorter Tawada pieces in various Dutch and English-language journals and books. During her stay at the Institute Brandt will be working on a new monograph tentatively entitled 'With Love from Vienna: Contextualizing the Daily Life of Viennese Elderly Jews after the Anschluss’. In the last two decades Holocaust studies have seen a notable shift in focus, moving away from examining the persecutors towards the study of Jewish daily life in the German Reich, often through ego-documents such as letters, diaries, memoirs or other personal objects. 'With Love from Vienna' follows this trend and contributes to it by concentrating on a still understudied group — elderly Jews in Vienna awaiting emigration to safe havens, including the USA, often via the UK. The former was, of course, a difficult destination because of the American immigration quotas that were not increased despite intensified anti-Semitism across much of Europe, and, especially relevant here, age discrimination. [April-May 2017]

Christine Ivanovic received her PhD in Comparative Literature from Erlangen University, Germany, as well as her Habilitation in Comparative Literature and in German Literature. Following eight years as foreign professor for German Literature at Tokyo University, she moved to Austria in 2011 where she currently holds a Berta Karlik Professorship in Comparative Literature at the University of Vienna. Her PhD thesis dealt with Paul Celan's readings of Russian poetry. She is especially interested in the works of German and Austrian writers in exile, as well as in exophonic writing, and has published widely on both topics. Currently her work focuses on the twin sisters Ilse Aichinger and Helga Michie, born in 1921 in Vienna. While Ilse Aichinger is a German writer of high repute – whose literary work comprises a novel and eight volumes of prose, radio plays and poems, and has been awarded several important literary prizes – Helga's art work has so far found little recognition. Helga emigrated at the age of 17 with one of the last Kindertransporte to London where she still lives. Very little is known about her life story, even though she came into contact with many famous writers and artists who also emigrated to England from Austria or the former Habsburg Empire. Helga herself composed and also published a small number of poems and other literary texts as well as literary translations. In her later years she became an artist and produced remarkable graphical works which have been shown in three exhibitions. The project to be conducted at the Institute traces Helga Michie's life story and her connections with other émigrés from Austria, and will result in an exhaustive documentation of her artwork which will be published and presented at the Research Centre for German and Austrian Exile Studies at the Institute in spring 2017. [December 2016]

Alice Lovejoy is Assistant Professor, Department of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature and Moving Image Studies Program, University of Minnesota and is a film and cultural historian whose research examines governmental and institutional media cultures in transnational perspective. Her research has been supported by fellowships and grants from, among others, the American Council of Learned Societies, Fulbright-Hays, and Fulbright, and her writing has appeared in journals including Screen, The Moving Image, East European Politics and Societies and Cultures, and Film Comment, where she has also worked as an editor. In 2015, Indiana University Press published her book Army Film and the Avant Garde: Cinema and Experiment in the Czechoslovak Military, with a companion DVD of 13 short films. As Martin Miller and Hannah Norbert-Miller Fellow at the Centre for German & Austrian Exile Studies, she will conduct research for her current project on exile-government film-making in World War II London. [May-June 2016]

Anne Martina Emonts is Assistant Professor of German Culture at the University of Madeira, Portugal. Her Masters (Madeira) in Portuguese Contemporary History, won her the National Award for Feminist Studies in Portugal, and was published in 2001. In 2006 she completed her PhD at the University of Madeira: Mechtilde Lichnowsky – Sprachlust und Sprachkritik. Annäherung an ein Kulturphänomen, was published in 2009). She is co-editor of Encontro entre Culturas. Conferências sobre temas luso-germânicas (2012) and Mulheres: Feminino, Plural (2013). As a senior researcher in the Culture and Conflict Sub-Group at the CECC (Communication & Culture Research Centre) at Lisbon University, her current research interests include the cultural heritage of war in the 20th century, gender studies and the transfer of (German-Jewish) modernisms in literature and visual art. She cooperates with the research group ‘Escritura autobiográfica de escritoras judeo-alemanas (s. XIX y XX)’ at the University of Santiago de Compostela, Spain. Her work as a Martin Miller and Hannah Norbert-Miller Fellow at the Centre for German & Austrian Exile Studies will focus on Mechtilde Lichnowsky’s ‘voluntary exiles’ and cultural life among others exiled in London before World War I and after World War II. [April-July 2015]

Kate Roy completed her PhD at the University of Manchester in 2008 and has subsequently been a postdoctoral researcher and recipient of small grants from among others, the Universities of Tübingen and Innsbruck, and from the DAAD, the Berlin State Library, and the Leverhulme Trust. She was most recently a Lecturer in German at the University of Leeds. Her current research project, tentatively entitled ‘1001 Re-tellings: Emily Ruete’s Memoiren einer arabischen Prinzessin in a literary context’, explores how both the writings of Emily Ruete (1844-1924), born Sayyida Salme, daughter of the Sultan of Oman and Zanzibar, and the rewritings of her life story, have intersected with different discourses over time, including Orientalism, German colonialism, and Islam in/and the West. As a Martin Miller and Hannah Norbert-Miller Fellow at the Centre for German & Austrian Exile Studies, she will work with material relating to the figure of Rudolph Said-Ruete, Emily Ruete’s son, a committed pacifist and long-time London resident, focusing on the narratives produced both by his own collection of pamphlets and popular literature from the First World War, gifted to Senate House Library, and by his recent novelistic reimagining. [September-December 2014]

Klaus Seidl obtained his doctorate at the University of Munich where he worked as a Research Assistant at the Department for Modern and Contemporary History. His thesis investigated the final phase of the German revolution of 1848 focusing on non-violent protest and public opinion, published in 2015. Most recently he held a post-doctoral fellowship at the German Historical Institute in Washington DC. His current research project is a biography of the liberal German historian Veit Valentin (1885-1947) who migrated to London (and later to the USA) in 1933, having being dismissed from his post as 'politically unreliable'. As a Martin Miller and Hannah Norbert-Miller Fellow at the Centre for German & Austrian Exile Studies, Klaus will work with material relating to Valentin’s time as a special lecturer at University College London, his involvement with German émigré networks, and the English perception of the refugee scholars. [October – November 2014]

Christian Cargnelli studied at the University of Vienna and completed his thesis on Austrian film personnel in British exile at the University of Southampton in 2008. Since the early 1990s, he has been researching on film exile and exile film, and since 1998 has been teaching film history and film exile at the University of Vienna. From 2004 to 2007 he worked in the AHRC-funded research project ‘German-speaking Emigrés in British Cinema, 1925-1950’ at the University of Southampton. In 2009-10 he was part of the research project ‘Filmwissenschaft in Wien 1929-1980’ which explored the history and development of film studies in Austria. His edited or co-edited volumes include Aufbruch ins Ungewisse. Österreichische Filmschaffende in der Emigration vor 1945 (1993), the melodrama reader Und immer wieder geht die Sonne auf. Texte zum Melodramatischen im Film (1994), Schatten. Exil. Europäische Emigranten im Film noir (1997), Carl Mayer, Scenar[t]ist (German & English, 2003), Gustav Machaty - Ein Filmregisseur zwischen Prag und Hollywood (2005), and Destination London: German-speaking Emigrés and British Cinema, 1925-1950 (2008). He has worked as a film journalist for many years, curating film retrospectives, and has organized several international conferences. He was nominated in 2004 and 2006 for the Willy Haas Award (best publication on German-language film). At the Institute he will pursue his interests in continental film personnel in Britain in the 1930s and 1940s. [September-December 2013]

Isabella Ferron studied at the University Ca' Foscari in Venice, then at the University of Tübingen. In 2008 she was awarded a doctorate by the University of Munich for her thesis on Wilhelm von Humboldt's philosophy of language, published in 2009 as 'Sprache ist Rede'. Ein Beitrag zur dynamischen und organizistischen Sprachauffassung Wilhelm von Humboldts. She also studied at the Humboldt-University in Berlin (2010-2012), where she held a DAAD Fellowship from October 2011 to February 2012. In October 2012 she was awarded a Fellowship at the Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach to work on Rudolf Borchardt's image of Italy. She teaches German at the University of Padua and her interests lie in literary theory, philosophy, German and English literature, cultural studies. Among her recent publications are: ‘”Die Sprache ist das bildende Organ des Gedankens”. Ein Nachdenken über die Sprachreflexion Wilhelm Humboldts und ihren Einfluss auf die Entstehung der modernen Sprachwissenschaft und Sprachphilosophie’ (2007); ‘Von der Wahrheit (1947): Zur Rolle der Sprache bei Karl Jaspers’ (2009); ‘Schelling und die Sprache. Einige Anmerkungen zu Schellings Nachdenken über die Sprache. Von der Philosophie der Kunst bis zu dem pasigraphischen Versuch’ (2009); ‘Wilhelm von Humboldts Übersetzung von Aischylos' Agamemnon (1816). Ein singulärer Beitrag zur Entstehung des Begriffs “Deutsche Nation“’ (2011). Her current research is on the work of Rudolf Borchardt and German literature in the first half of the 20th century, and on exile literature. Her research project at the Institute will deal with the work of Rudolf Majut and his relationship with the George Circle. [October-December 2013]

Laure Guilbert holds a PhD in History and Civilization from the European University Institute of Fiesole. Her monograph Danser avec le Troisième Reich. Les danseurs modernes sous le nazisme  was published in 2000 (new edition, 2011). She has taught mainly in performing arts departments in Paris 3, Versailles, Metz and Lille Universities. From 2002 onwards she has been in charge of the dance publishing department of the Paris National Opera. Her current research project concerns the exile and diasporas of the German choreographic world in the 1930s and 1940s. During her stay at the Institute, she will focus her attention on the German refugees in Great Britain. [October-December 2012]

Martina Kolb is Assistant Professor of German and Comparative Literature at Pennsylvania State University. She taught in the Humanities Core Program at Bilkent University, Ankara, and was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study at the Universities of Constance and Bologna. She holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from Yale University, a graduate degree in Modern Philology from the University of Tübingen, and an MA in German Studies from the University of Oregon. She is the author of Nietzsche, Freud, Benn, and the Azure Spell of Liguria (2013). She has also published articles on Dante’s and Brecht’s love poetry, on Benn’s poetics, on Freud’s Nietzscheanism, on Brecht, Weigel and the Asian stage, on Pound’s prison writing, and on the uncanny in Uwe Johnson. She has translated Benn into English, and interviews with Holocaust survivors into German, and is contributing editor of Bloom’s Major Dramatists: Bertolt Brecht (2003). Her main research interests are place, displacement, and emotion in art and literature, with an emphasis on geo-poetics, exile studies, the inter-arts, and psychoanalysis. She is in the process of writing a book on visual and verbal representations of fear and pain. During her stay at the Institute, she will work on the chapter that examines Ingeborg Bachmann’s exile poetics. [May-June 2013]

Hadwig Kraeutler graduated in 1974 from the Academy of Fine Arts and the University in Vienna, and holds a doctorate from the School of Museum Studies at University of Leicester. Her thesis was published as a monograph, Otto Neurath. Museum and Exhibition Work. Spaces (Designed) for Communication (2008). From 1992 until 2012 she was on the staff of the Belvedere in Vienna, and has been lecturing and publishing about museum communication and learning, exhibition design, and its interpretive potential for engaging (with) the users. Her research interests are basically interdisciplinary and concern museology, communication, art and cultural history, exhibition texts and evaluation, more recently with a focus on exile studies. Her current research concerns the life story and scholarship of Alma S. Wittlin (1899-1992), an exiled Austrian museologist, writer, and educationalist. During her stay at the Institute, she will focus her attention on this émigré’s time and networks in Great Britain. [March 2013]