
Dr Sofia Cumming
BAhons, MSt, PhD
Expertise
Current positions
Senior Research Associate
Department of German
Contact
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Research interests
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.
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.
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.
My research interests span German Studies, Comparative Literature, Continental Philosophy and Critical Theory, with a particular focus on:
· Transnational and comparative approaches, especially Franco-German cultural and intellectual relations, multilingualism and the movement of literature and ideas across national and linguistic contexts
· 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
· The Frankfurt School and French critical thought, particularly their intellectual networks and encounters, as well as their circulation and reception across national contexts
· Exile, migration and transnational writing, especially German-Jewish intellectual and literary cultures and the continuities between interwar, exile and postwar contexts
· Translation and cultural mediation, including theories and philosophies of translation and the role of translation in cross-cultural literary exchange
Projects and supervisions
Research projects
UKRI3454 Interconnecting Exile: Practices of Recollection, Intertextuality and Memory in German-language writing (19th-21st centuries)
Principal Investigator
Role
Researcher
Managing organisational unit
Department of GermanDates
01/02/2026 to 31/01/2029
Publications
Recent publications
01/01/2024‘Little Forms’ of the Avant-Garde: Walter Benjamin's Einbahnstraße (One-Way Street, 1928)
Title of host publicationSubversion and Conformity of Literary Collage: Between Cut and Glue
Berlin – Paris – Marseille: Walter Benjamin and Les Cahiers du Sud
Monatshefte
“Fiber der Gegenwart”: Walter Benjamins Frankreich
Recherches Germaniques
Walter Benjamin’s Parisian passages: correspondences in European thought
Benjamin und Aragon: Zur Frage des Einflusses
lendemains