My research interests lie in the German literature and history of the late eighteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries, and in the interplay of literature, historiography and history. My doctoral thesis traced the influence of Schiller’s History of the Thirty Years War and drama Wallen­stein on subsequent historiographical as well as literary interpretations of Wallenstein, analysing the figure’s role in the construction of German national and ethnic identity in the nineteenth century.

More recently I have worked in particular on German-language exile literature across a similar broad timespan from the end of the eighteenth century to the middle of the twentieth. This project was enabled by a two-year Leverhulme Trust Major Research Fellowship from September 2017 to August 2019 and it has led to a new, collaborative project co-led with Prof. Doerte Bischoff at the University of Hamburg and Prof. Esther Kilchmann at the University of Kiel, on interconnection and intertextuality in exile literature. This project is funded from 2026 to 2029 by the joint AHRC/DFG funding scheme in the Humanities. My book German Exile Literature in the Age of Nations was published in 2026 by Camden House.  

I have also worked in detail on the novelist Alfred Döblin (1878-1957), uncovering Döblin’s response to the traumas of war and exile in his novel Hamlet oder Die lange Nacht nimmt ein Ende (1946/1956, translated into English as Tales of a Long Night, 1984). I am an editor of German Life and Letters and was a co-editor of Angermion from 2010 to 2016.

I warmly welcome proposals for postgraduate work in all these fields, and would also welcome contact in Welsh and on links between Wales and the German-speaking world.