{"componentChunkName":"component---src-templates-person-person-tsx","path":"/person/Sofia-Cumming-33683aea-e1a0-4de0-befd-f610740c75c2/","result":{"data":{"person":{"id":"33683aea-e1a0-4de0-befd-f610740c75c2","profilePicture":"https://research-information.bris.ac.uk/ws/files/494604063/202_1846.jpeg","profileType":"ACADEMIC","title":"Dr","firstName":"Sofia","lastName":"Cumming","addresses":[{"firstLine":"21 Woodland Road","secondLine":"Clifton","thirdLine":"Bristol","fourthLine":null,"fifthLine":null,"postCode":"BS8 1TE","country":null}],"socialMedia":[],"expertiseTags":["Comparative Literatures and Cultures","German Studies","Transnational Studies","Translation Studies","Critical Theory","Continental Philosophy & Aesthetics","French Studies","World Literature","Franco-German Relations","US-German Relations","Walter Benjamin"],"biography":null,"postNominals":"BAhons, MSt, PhD","websiteLink":null,"email":"sofia.cumming@bristol.ac.uk","telephone":[],"snippet":null,"teaching":null,"researchInterest":"

My research explores modern Germanophone literature, culture and thought through questions of transnational circulation, mediation and comparison. I have worked extensively on Franco-German literary and philosophical relations in the interwar and postwar periods, in particular the life, writings and legacy of Walter Benjamin. My doctoral thesis, Walter Benjamin’s Parisian Passages: Correspondences in European Thought, examined Benjamin’s sustained engagement with French literary, aesthetic and philosophical traditions, highlighting his role as an intermediary in interwar European intellectual exchange.

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My subsequent research has extended these interests to the transnational journalism of German-Jewish critics across the publishing contexts of Weimar Germany, France and the United States. I am currently a Postdoctoral Research Associate on the AHRC–DFG-funded project Interconnecting Exile: Practices of Recollection, Intertextuality and Memory in German-Language Writing (19th–21st Centuries) (2026–29), which investigates the significance and function of intertextual practices across different forms of exile literature, in collaboration with colleagues at the University of Hamburg.

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I am a contributor to the edited volume Subversion and Conformity of Literary Collage (Routledge, 2024), my work has been published in Monatshefte, Recherches Germaniques and lendemains, and I am a regular reviewer for the Times Literary Supplement.

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My research interests span German Studies, Comparative Literature, Continental Philosophy and Critical Theory, with a particular focus on:

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·   Transnational and comparative approaches, especially Franco-German cultural and intellectual relations, multilingualism and the movement of literature and ideas across national and linguistic contexts

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·   Literary and cultural criticism, particularly journalism and feuilletonism emerging from the Weimar Republic, with a focus on the works of Walter Benjamin, Siegfried Kracauer and Hannah Arendt

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·   The Frankfurt School and French critical thought, particularly their intellectual networks and encounters, as well as their circulation and reception across national contexts

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·   Exile, migration and transnational writing, especially German-Jewish intellectual and literary cultures and the continuities between interwar, exile and postwar contexts

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·  Translation and cultural mediation, including theories and philosophies of translation and the role of translation in cross-cultural literary exchange

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