Prof. Dr. Benjamin Kohlmann

I am a historian of British literature and culture working on the period from 1860 to the present. I have a special interest in the relationship between literature and politics, including the literary and cultural histories of socialism (and communism). I studied at the University of Freiburg (Germany) and at Yale. I earned my doctorate from the University of Oxford and Habilitation (postdoctoral degree) from the University of Freiburg. Subsequent postdocs and visiting fellowships brought me to Columbia University (Dept of English and Comparative Literature); Jesus College, Cambridge; UC Davis (English Department); the University of East Anglia (School of Literature, Drama, and Creative Writing); and Queen Mary, University of London (Dept of Comparative Literature). I have also been elected Visiting Fellow at Clare Hall, University of Cambridge. I took up my current position at Regensburg in November 2020. 

Much of my early research focussed on British modernism, especially the politicized modernism of the later interwar years. This work includes my first monograph, Committed Styles: Modernism, Politics, and Left Wing Literature in the 1930s (Oxford UP, 2014). More recently, my work has included the prehistory of the welfare state (c.1860-1940); literary and cultural histories of populism; comparative and global approaches to literature; and literary and cultural theory. My second monograph, British literature and the Life of Institutions: Speculative States, was published by Oxford UP in 2021. Current projects include a global history of the radical bildungsroman, 1820-2020 (under contract with Verso). 

With Janice Ho (UBC Vancouver) and Matthew Taunton (UEA), I am co-editor of a new book series with Oxford UP on "Literature and Politics". 

Education

09/2011-06/2017    Habilitation, English Literature, University of Freiburg                                                    (Title: "Writing the Common Good: Literature, the Economy, and                                   the Idea of the Welfare State, 1776-1911")

10/2007-09/2010    PhD, English Literature, Lincoln College, University of Oxford

08/2004-09/2007    MA, Philosophy / English Literature, University of Freiburg and                                       Yale University

10/2001-07/2004    Undergraduate Studies, Philosophy / English Literature,                                                 University of Freiburg

Employment

2022                          Offer: Chair of English Literature and Culture, FAU Erlangen-                                          Nuremberg (declined)

11/2020-present       Full Professor (Heisenberg), University of Regensburg

04/2020-10/2020     Research Fellow (Heisenberg), University of Regensburg

04/2019-03/2020     Acting Professor of English Literature, University of Hamburg

09/2011-08/2019     Assistant / Associate Professor, University of Freiburg

10/2020-08/2011     Lecturer, University of Regensburg

Visiting Positions

• Visiting Fellow, Department of Comparative Literature, Queen Mary University London (2019; one month)
• Visiting Fellow, English Department, University of California, Davis (2018; three months)
• Visiting Member, Jesus College, University of Cambridge (2016-2017; six months)
• Visiting Fellow, English Department, University of East Anglia (2016-2017; six months)
• Humboldt Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University (2012-2013; twelve months)

Prizes and Fellowships

• Heisenberg Programme, German Research Foundation (five-year research grant, 2020-2025)
• Heinz Maier-Leibnitz Prize, awarded by the German Research Foundation (DFG), 2018
• Project funding (three years), "Literature, Liberalism, and the Laissez-Faire Economy, 1776-1900", Elite Programme for Postdocs, Baden Württemberg Foundation (funding for PhD student and additional funding for conference organisation and travel)
• Research Fellowship, German Research Foundation
• Feodor Lynen Fellowship, Alexander von Humboldt Foundation
• Michael Foster Memorial Scholarship, awarded by the University of Oxford (waiving university and college fees during doctoral study)
• PhD scholarship, German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD)
• Baden-Württemberg Scholarship (to study at Yale University)
• Scholar of the German National Academic Foundation (Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes), 2003-2010
• Grants for the organisation of international conferences from ZIF (Centre for Interdisciplinary Research, Bielefeld University), Thyssen Foundation, DFG, and other institutions
• Travel grants from DAAD, the University of Oxford, and other institutions

Professional Service

• Editorial board, Critical Quarterly
• Advisory board, CUSP: Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century Cultures
• Advisory committee (elected), PMLA
• Member of the Board of Directors, English Department, University of Freiburg (2017-19)
• Member of PhD Selection Committee, German Academic Exchange Service (2010-14)
• Referee for Oxford University Press; Cambridge University Press; Bloomsbury; PMLA; ELH; Literature and History; Modernism/Modernity; Victorian Network; Key Words: Journal of the Raymond Williams Society; Modern Philology; German Research Foundation; Research Foundation Flanders

Professional Memberships

• Academia Europaea (elected member)
• International Association of University Professors of English (elected member)
• Young Academy of Europe (elected member, 2014-21)
• Modern Language Association
• American Comparative Literature Association
• Modernist Studies Association
• North American Victorian Studies Association
• British Association of Modernist Studies
• The William Hazlitt Society

Monographs

• World Literature and the Work of Revolution: A Radical History of the Bildungsroman, 1820-2020. Under contract with Verso.
• British Literature and the Life of Institutions: Speculative States. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021. [Reviewed in Nineteenth-Century Literature; Studies in the Novel; Arcadia; The Wellsian; Textual Practice; Journal of Modern Literature]
• Committed Styles: Modernism, Politics, and Left-Wing Literature in the 1930s. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. [Reviewed in Times Literary Supplement; Review of English Studies; Literature and History; Modernist Cultures; Ostrava Journal; ZAA; Year's Work in English Studies; Twentieth-Century Literature]

Edited Volumes

• Ed. (with M. Taunton) The People: Belonging, Exclusion, and Democracy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, in progress.
• Ed. (with Charlotte Jones) Literature, Politics, and Aesthetics after the Paris Commune: Communal Forms. Oxford: Oxford University Press, in preparation. 
• Ed. (with I. Perica) The Political Uses of Literature: Global Perspectives and Theoretical Approaches, 1920-2020. London: Bloomsbury, 2024.
• Ed. (with I. Perica), Peripheral Europes. Special issue of Critical Quarterly 65.4 (2023).
• Ed. (with Katrin Becker and Felix Sprang). British Fictions of Class since 1945: Revitalising Class in the Twenty-First Century. Special issue of Anglistik 34.1 (2023). 
• (Ed.) George Orwell, Keep the Aspidistra Flying. Oxford World's Classics, 2021.
• Ed. (with M. Taunton) A History of 1930s British Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. [Books of the Year, Times Literary Supplement. Reviewed in: The Modernist Review, Textual Practice]
• Ed. (with M. Taunton) Literatures of Anti-Communism. Special issue of Literature and History (Spring 2015).
• Ed. Edward Upward and Left-Wing Literary Culture in Britain. London: Ashgate, 2013. [Reviewed in Times Literary Supplement; Review of English Studies; Literature and History; Key Words: The Journal of the Raymond Williams Society, SHARP News]
• Ed. (with R. Gregory) Utopian Spaces of Modernism: British Literature and Culture 1885-1945. London: Palgrave, 2012. [Reviewed in Victorian Studies; Modernism/Modernity; Year's Work in English Studies]
• Ed. (with M. Fludernik) Anglistentag 2011 - Proceedings. Trier: wvt, 2012.

Journal Articles

• "Introduction" (with I. Perica), Peripheral Europes (special issue), Critical Quarterly 65.4 (2023), 3-12.
• "Liberal". Victorian Literature and Culture 51.3 (2023), 447-51.
• "Introduction" to Karl-August Varnhagen von Ense's "In the Sense of the Wanderers (1832)" [on the Left bildungsroman and Goethe's Wilhelm Meister novels], PMLA 138.1 (2023), 102-9. 
• "Reformist Reading: Reparative Critique, c.1900". Cusp: Late 19th-/Early 20th- Century Cultures 1.1, 8-17.
• "Thatcherism's Ongoing Now." ASAP/Journal 8.1 (2023), 23-6. 
• “Slow Politics: H.G. Wells, Reform, and the Idea of the Welfare State”. Modern Fiction Studies 67.2 (2021), 342-65.
• “Revolutionary Words: Perfect Languages and the Republican Imaginary around the Mid-Seventeenth Century”. Archiv für das Studium der neueren Sprachen und Literaturen 258.2 (2021), 366-85
• "Sounding the Present: Crisis and Collective Voice in David Peace’s GB84". English Literary History 87 (2020), 829-54.
• "Julien Green and the Murmur of the Sea: Literary Histories of Flotsam". Critical Quarterly 62.2 (2020), 54-68.
• "Proletarian Modernism: Literature, Film, Theory". PMLA 134.5 (2019), 1056-75.
• "'Plain and Positive Terms': The Idea of a Perfect Language in Early Modern Utopian Narratives". Literaturwissenschaftliches Jahrbuch 59 (2018), 155-81.
• "The Victorian Crisis of Laissez-Faire: George Eliot, Political Economy, and the Common Good", History of Political Economy 48:4 (2016), 681-704.
• "Toward a History and Theory of the Socialist Bildungsroman", NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, 48:2 (2015), 167-89.
• "What Is It Like to Be a Rat? Early Cold War Glimpses of the Post-Human", Textual Practice 28/4 (2014), 655-75.
• “Awkward Moments: Melodrama, Modernism, and the Politics of Affect”, PMLA 128/2 (2013), 337-52.
• “An Honest Decade: William Empson and the Ambiguities of Writing in the 1930s”, English Literary History 80/1 (2013), 221-49
• "Edward Upward, W. H. Auden, and the Rhetorical Victories of Communism", Modernism/Modernity 20/2 (2013), 287-306.
• “‘Men of Sobriety and Buisnes’: Pepys, Privacy, and Public Duty”, Review of English Studies 61/251 (2010), 553-71
• “‘The Heritage of Symbolism’: Henry Green, Maurice Bowra, and English Modernism in the 1920s”, Modern Language Notes 124/5 (2009), 1188-1210
• “‘Stand Still, True Poet That You Are!’ Remembering the Brownings, Imagining Memorabilia”, ZAA 57/2 (2009), 125-38

Book Chapters

• “George Gissing: Idealism and Social Reform”. In: The Novel of Ideas. Ed. Rachel Potter and Matthew Taunton. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, forthcoming.
• “George Orwell and the ‘Auden Generation’. In: The Oxford Handbook of George Orwell. Ed. Nathan Waddell. Oxford: Oxford UP, forthcoming.
• "Introduction" (with Ivana Perica), The Political Uses of Literature: Global Perspectives and Theoretical Approaches, 1920-2020. London: Bloomsbury, 2024. 1-20.
• "Symptoms: Literature and Activism before the 'Political Unconscious'." In: The Routledge Companion to Literature and Politics. Ed. Matthew Stratton. London: Routledge, 2023. 42-53.
• "In Real Time: Phenomenologies of Precarity in Ali Smith's Seasonal Quartet." In: Literary Representations of Precarious Work, 1840 to the Present. Ed. Bart Philippsen and Michiel Ries. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan 2021. 287-304.
• "From Proletarianization to Precarization in New British Fiction". In: Precarity in British Literature and Culture. Ed. Emily J. Hogg and Peter Simonsen. London: Bloomsbury, 2021. 143-59
• (with M. Taunton) "Introduction: The Long 1930s". A History of 1930s British Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2019. 1-14.
• "Fashioning the 1930s". Cambridge Companion to British Literature in the 1930s. Ed. James Smith. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2019. 224-38.
• "Cognitive Sympathy and the Laissez-Faire Economy: Adam Smith and Harriet Martineau". Anglistentag 2017 - Proceedings. Trier: wvt, 2018. 135-44.
• "Muße, Work, and Free Time: Nineteenth-Century Visions of the Non-Alienated Life". How to Do Things With Narrative: Theory and Practice. Ed. Jan Alber and Greta Olson. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2017. 187-204.
• "'The End of Laissez-Faire': Literature, Economics, and the Idea of the Welfare State". Late Victorian into Modern, 1880-1920. Ed. Laura Marcus, Michèle Mendelssohn, and Kirsten Shepherd-Barr. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2016. 448-62.
• "Das Ich in der Revolte: Der Bildungsroman nach 1945 aus komparatistischer Perspektive". Vom 'unrettbaren' zum 'wiedergefundenen' Ich? Identitätsnarrative im 20. Jahrhundert. Ed. Heribert Tommek and Christian Steltz. Frankfurt: Lang, 2016. 145-63.
• "'Possible Failures': Doris Lessing and Individual Formation in a Tragic Key". Anglistentag 2014 - Proceedings. Trier: wvt, 2015. 353-63.
• "Christopher Isherwood and Edward Upward". The American Isherwood. Ed. Jim Berg and Christopher Freeman. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2015. 198-214.
• "Versions of Working-Class Idleness: Non-Productivity and the Critique of Victorian Workaholism". Leisure, Idleness and Indolence in British Literature. Ed. Monika Fludernik and Miriam Nandi. Basingstoke: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2014. 195-214.
• "Introduction". Edward Upward and Left-Wing Literary Culture in Britain. London: Ashgate, 2013. 1-18.
• "Introduction". Utopian Spaces of Modernism: British Literature and Culture, 1885-1945. Ed. Rosalyn Gregory and Benjamin Kohlmann. London: Palgrave, 2012. 1-18.

Handbook and Dictionary Entries

• “Thomas Love Peacock”, “Thomas Lovell Beddoes”, “Edmund Burke”. Encyclopaedia of Literary Romanticism. Ed. Andrew Maunders. New York, 2010
• “Edward Upward”, Literary Encyclopedia, www.litencyc.com, 2010 [2500 words]

Reviews

• Review of Peter Stansky, Edward Upward: Art and Life. Woolf Studies Annual, 23 (2017), 199-202.
• Review of Marius Hentea, TaTa Dada: The Real Life and Celestial Adventures of Tristan Tzara. Modernism/Modernity, 22/1 (2015), 206-8.
• Review of Jock Macleod, Literature, Journalism, and the Vocabularies of Liberalism. ZAA, 61/1 (2014), 93-95.
• Review of Jed Esty, Unseasonable Youth: Modernism, Colonialism, and the Fiction of Development. Modernist Cultures, 9/2 (2014), 310-14.
• Review of Ina Habermann, Myth, Memory, and the Middlebrow: Priestley, du Maurier, and the Symbolic Form of Englishness. ZAA, 61/1 (2013), 93-95.
• Review of Kristin Bluemel, ed., Intermodernism: Literary Culture in Mid-Twentieth-Century Britain. Modernist Cultures, 6/1 (2011), 196-98
• Review of Paul Crosthwaite, Trauma, Postmodernism, and the Aftermath of World War II, Modern Language Review, 105/2 (2010), 546-47

Translations

• Poems by Silke Scheuermann. Inventory Journal (2014)

Conferences organized

• "Politics and Literature", UBC Vancouver, 2024 (with Janice Ho and Matthew Taunton)
• "The Aesthetics of Failure: Disruption, Loss, Decline", Notre Dame Global Gateway, London, 2024 (with Joseph Elkanah Rosenberg)
• "Writing Collectivity: Forms, Figures, Agency", University of Regensburg, 2024 (with Matthew Taunton)
• "Modernism and Byzantium", Istanbul (Haliç University), 2024 (with Christos Hadjiyiannis and Demet Karabulut)
• "Writing Revolution: Radical Traditions and their Literary Legacies from the Nineteenth Century to Today", University of Regensburg, 2023 (with Anna Vaninskaya)
• "The Paris Commune at 150", London, The Royal Foundation of St Katharine, 2021 (with Charlotte Jones)
• Conference, The Political Uses of Literature: Comparative Approaches, Theoretical Perspectives. LMU Munich, 2020 (with Ivana Perica); funded by the Graduate School “Globalization and Literature” and LMU Universitätsstiftung.
• Conference, Radical Styles: Forms, Commitments, Traditions, University of Freiburg, 2019.
• Conference, The Proletarian Moment: Interdisciplinary Approaches, Comparative Perspectives, ZIF (Centre for Interdisciplinary Research), University of Bielefeld, 2018 (with Sabine Hake); funded by ZIF
• Conference, Post-, Neo-, Anti-: The Futures of Critique, University of Freiburg, 2018
• Conference, Modern Literature, Organisations, and Institutions, University of East Anglia, 2017 (with Rachel Potter and Matthew Taunton)
• Conference, Symmetry, Proportion, Seriality: Convergences in Science and the Arts, Academia Europaea Conference, University of Freiburg, 2015 (with Andreas Buchleitner, Monika Fludernik, Martin Middeke); funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG)
• Conference, EUCOR PhD and MA Conference, University of Freiburg, 2014 (two days; with Wolfgang Hochbruck and Monika Fludernik)
• Conference, "Anti-Communism: Culture, Literature, Propaganda", Institute of English Studies, London, 2013 (with Matthew Taunton); funded by the Leverhulme Trust
• Conference, "Cultivating the Economy: Literature, Politics, Economics, 1870-1940", Heyman Center for the Humanities, Columbia University, 2013; funded by Thyssen Foundation
• Conference, “Utopian Spaces of British Literature, 1890-1945”, English Faculty, University of Oxford, 2009 (with Rosalyn Gregory)

Invited and Keynote Lectures

• "Internationalism and the Work of Revolution: Towards a Radical History of the Bildungsroman", UC Berkeley, 2024.
• "Collectivity and Internationalism in the Radical Bildungsroman, 1820-2020", Queen's University Belfast, 2024.
• "From Weltliteratur to World Revolution: The History of the Radical Bildungsroman", LMU Munich, 2024.
• "Internationalism and the Work of Revolution: Towards a Radical History of the Bildungroman", CUNY Graduate Center, 2023.
• Keynote, "World-Shaping in the Radical Bildungsroman", How Do Stories Shape Our World? (inaugural English Faculty postgraduate symposium), University of Cambridge, 2023. 
• "Decolonizing the Novel: Formative Fictions in the Work of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o", University of Gour Banga (India), 2021.
• Keynote, "Substanceless Subjectivity: Crisis and Collectivity in British Experimental Fiction", University of Leuven, 2020.
• "Modernism and Revolution: Literary Politics before the 'Political Unconscious'", Harvard University, Mahindra Humanities Center, 2019.
• "Julien Green and the Murmur of the Sea", University of Cambridge, 2019.
• "Modernist Internationalism", Global Modernisms / Global Modernities Summer School, University of Hamburg, 2019.
• "Auden, Rilke, and the Island-Mind", University of Cambridge, 2018.
• "Realist Montage: Realism and Formal Experiment at the Mid-Century", Lewis and Clark College (Portland), 2018.
• "Rethinking the Aesthetics of Classlessness", University of California (Santa Cruz), 2018.
• "The Reformist Literary Mode and the Welfare State", University of Colorado (Boulder), 2018.
• "Surface Reading", Centre for Uses of Literature, University of Southern Denmark, 2017.
• "Speculative States: British Literature's Hegelian Moment", Center for Welfare State Research, University of Southern Denmark, 2017.
• "Means and Ends: Anglistische Perspektiven auf das Verhältnis von Literatur und Politik", University of Erlangen, 2017.
• "Towards a Literary Prehistory of the Welfare State", English Department, Durham University, 2017.
• "Proletarian Modernism in the Long 1930s", English Department, University of Manchester, 2017.
• "States of Welfare: Modernism and the Reformist Literary Mode", English Department, University of East Anglia, 2017.
• "Democracy and Dictatorship: Literary Visions of Classlessness", English Department, Sheffield Hallam University, 2017.
• Keynote, "Outside of the Frame of Theory: Literature and the Place of Politics", Outside the Frame of Theory Conference, University of Freiburg, 2017.
• "Slow Politics: Modernism, Reform, and the Idea of the Welfare State", English Faculty, University of Oxford, 2016.
• "Proletarian Modernism", English Department, University of California, Santa Barbara, 2016.
• "The State Beyond Governmentality: Literary Reformism and the Emergence of the Welfare State", English Department, University of Notre Dame, 2016.
• "Modernism and the Idea of the Welfare State", English Department, University of California, Davis, 2016.
• Keynote, "The State Beyond Governmentality", Welfare and Welfare Narratives Conference, Center for Welfare State Research, University of South Denmark, 2016.
• "Automatic Subjects", Novel Marxisms Workshop, Center for the Study of the Novel, Stanford University, 2016.
• "Government and the State: Late Victorian Literature and the Politics of Reform", School of English, University of Sussex, 2016.
• "The Apolitical Unconscious of 1930s Literature", English Department, University of Gent, 2014.
• "Rethinking the 1930s: Literature, Politics, and the Communist Voice", English Department, Stanford University, 2013.
• "'Higher Feelings' and the State: Literature, Economic Discourse, and the End of Laissez-Faire, 1870-1930", Max Planck Institute for Human Development (Centre for "History of the Emotions"), Berlin, 2012.
• "Awkward Moments: Modernism, Melodrama, and the Politics of Affect", English Department, Brunel University, 2011.

Conference Papers (Selected)

• "Britain's Long Hegelian Moment", Modernist Studies Association, Toronto, 2019.
• "Proletarian Modernism", American Comparative Literature Association Conference, Utrecht 2017.
• "'Machinery with a Common Purpose': Reformism and the Ends of the State", Modernist Studies Association, Pasadena, 2016.
• "Proletarianiziation and Its Discontents", Modernist Studies Association, Pasadena, 2016.
• "True Ownership: Edward Carpenter and the Nationalization of Land", NAVSA, Phoenix, 2016.
• "Edward Carpenter, Land Nationalisation, and Late Victorian Popular Politics", BritCult Conference, University of Erlangen, 2015.
• "The Long 1930s", Writing Literary History, University of Leuven, 2015.
• "The Socialist Bildungsroman and the Time of the Revolution", Anglistentag, Hanover, 2014.
• "Genealogies of Welfare: Ideas of the Common Good in E.M. Forster", Modernist Studies Association, Pittsburgh, 2014.
• "'A Romance about Capital': E.M. Forster and the Idea of the Welfare State", Modernist Communities, Paris, 2014.
• "Politics Without Footnotes", Modernist Studies Association, Brighton, 2013.
• "Spiral Descent: Communist Anti-Communism after World War II", Anti-Communism: Literature, Culture, Propaganda, Institute of English Studies, London, 2013.
• "Forms of Preparedness: E.M. Forster, Risk, and Unemployment Insurance", Cultivating the Economy, Columbia University, 2013.
• "The Drama of Preparedness: Unemployment Insurance and E.M. Forster's (New) Liberal Aesthetic", On Liberties: Victorian Liberals and Their Legacies, Gladstone's Library, Hawarden (UK), 2013.
• "'Playing with Bright Images': The Making and Unmaking of Surrealist Black Humour", Space Between Conference, DePaul University, Chicago 2013.
• "Auden, Isherwood, and Post-Liberal Citizenship", Modernist Studies Association, Las Vegas, 2012.
• "A Lost Generation: The Literature of the 1930s and Writing after Modernism", Generation M: Resetting Modernist Time. UVA, Amsterdam, 2012.
• "'Brittle Ghosts': Surrealism, History, and Black Humour in the 1930s", History and Humour. Freiburg, 2012.
• “The Poverty of Surrealism: Social Critique in Early Mass-Observation”, The ‘Space Between’ Conference, McGill University, Montreal, 2011.
• "What Is It Like To Be a Rat? Thomas Pynchon and Early Cold War Glimpses of the Post-Human", Research Seminar, Regensburg University, 2011.
• "A ‘Radical Aesthetic’? Social Facts and Poetic Authority in Mass-Observation”, Modernism and Utopia, University of Birmingham, 2010.
• “‘The Heart of Standing Is You Cannot Fly’: William Empson and Taking Sides”, Utopian Spaces of British Literature and Culture, 1890-1945, University of Oxford, 2009.
• “Henry Green, Maurice Bowra, and the ‘Heritage of Symbolism’”, Twentieth-Century Literature Research Seminar, University of Oxford, 2009.
• “The Uses of Poetry: From T. S. Eliot to William Empson”, MLA Convention, Poetry Division (chaired by Susan J. Wolfson and Alan Golding), San Francisco, 2008.
• “Poetical Remains: Robert Browning in the Marketplace”, Bodies and Things: Victorian Literature and the Matter of Culture Conference, University of Oxford, 2008.

PhD Theses

• Nikolina Hatton, “Decommodified Things in English Novels and Political Economy, 1790-1850“ (summa cum laude; 2018)
• Mir Ali Hosseini, “Between Dissensus and Consensus: Democracy and the Essay Form at the Mid-Twentieth Century” (ongoing)
• Evelin Stumberger, "Nineteenth-Century Extraction and the Great Emigration" (ongoing)

MA Theses

• Andrea Claudia Geanta, “Love and Business in Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield and Other Works” (2014)
• Oleksandra Dragan, “Monsters from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to Contemporary Cinema” (2015)
• Nina Brunner, “Writing against the Cash Nexus: The Representation of Work in George Eliot’s Novels” (2015)
• Teona Micevska, “Modernist Female Dandyism: Queerness of Form and Identity“ (2015)
• Christian Lassen, “Peritextual Elements in Charles Dickens and Mark Twain” (2016)
• Anirudh Sridhar, “Metaphorical Mathematics and the Symbolism of Shapes and Numbers in Modernist Poetry“ (2016)
• Albina Okanovic, “Victorian Governess Rewritten: Representations of Femininity in the Victorian Sensation Novel“
• Mir Ali Hosseini, “Writing against the Grain: Style in Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and Derrida” (2017; diese Abschlussarbeit gewann den Fakultätspreis für die beste MA-Arbeit)
• Kerrin Kluewer, “The Work of Mourning: The Poetry of Charlotte Mew and Mina Loy” (2017)
• Hannah Rehm, “Alternative Ecologies: The New Nature Writing and Its Precursors” (2017)
• Elissa Wittke, “Networks of Things: The Design Theory of Ray and Charles Eames” (2018)
• Saina Tarverdy, “Fabulating Nomadic Subjects: The Figure of the Becomer in Modernist Literature” (2019)

• Kalina Janeva, “Riffing on the Page: The Racial Politics of Blues and Jazz in Interwar Modernist Writing” (2020)

Since 2020: Numerous theses supervised at the University of Regensburg. 

BA Theses

• Esther Gnandt, “‘There must be some secret at the bottom of all this’: Crime and Gender in Lady Audley’s Secret” (2015)
• Caroline Böckling, “A Perfect Product of Society: Women and Social Power in Pride and Prejudice and The Age of Innocence” (2015)
• Julia Ditter, “Mental Illness as a Symptom of Ideological Oppression: Social Criticism in Janice Galloway’s The Trick Is to Keep Breathing and Jenni Fagan’s The Panopticon” (2016)
• Laura Vartolomei, “Cuckoldry in English Renaissance Drama“ (2016)
• Katharina Schantz, “Eighteenth-Century Grand Tour Narratives as Ethnographic Writing: Smollett’s and Sterne’s Accounts of Italy and France“ (2016)
• Mathias Jacoby, “Gothic Short Fiction: A Comparative Analysis of Le Fanu and Hawthorne” (2016)
• Jonas Scheid, “Victorian Detective Legacies: Charles Dickens and Terry Pritchard” (2018)
• Alina Ruschen, “We Can Be Heroes: Illness in Young Adult Fiction” (2018)
• Viktor Chlowka, “The Documentary Impulse: British Literature and Film in the 1940s” (2019)
• Mareike Reinfandt, “Marginalized Voices in Troubled Times: The Northern Irish Novels A Son Called Gabriel by Damian McNicholl and Milkman by Anna Burns” (2019)
• Sophia Wolf, “A Female Rendering of Space in Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage” (2019)

Since 2020: Numerous theses supervised at the University of Regensburg.