Literary and Cultural Studies, Performance, and Art

He is the author of Narrating the Prison (Cambria Press, 2007) and Unnatural Narrative: Impossible Worlds in Fiction and Drama (University of Nebraska Press, 2016). Alber received fellowships and research grants from the British Academy, the German Research Foundation (DFG), and the Humboldt Foundation. In 2013, the German Association of University Teachers of English awarded him the prize for the best Habilitation written between 2011 and 2013. Between 2014 and 2016, he worked as a COFUND (Marie-Curie) Fellow at the Aarhus Institute of Advanced Studies (AIAS) in Denmark. His project focused on the negotiation of Aboriginal identities in contemporary Australian narratives. Alber is currently President of the International Society for the Study of Narrative (ISSN).

While doing research for her dissertation on Aboriginal Gothic, she stayed at the University of New South Wales, with a grant from the German Academic Exchange Service. She completed her PhD at the University of Bonn, Germany. Her thesis was published as Darkness Subverted: Aboriginal Gothic in Black Australian Literature and Film in 2010 and was nominated for the Walter McRae Russell Award for Literary Scholarship 2011. She also is a board member of the German Association for Australian Studies (GASt) and in 2018 hosted the biennial conference of the GASt on ‘Australian Perspectives on Migration’.

In her research, she focuses on Postcolonial and Indigenous Studies as well as law and literature and cross-media studies. Katrin has published widely in the area of Australian literature and has combined postcolonial approaches with the Gothic, as well as with law and literature studies. She held positions at the universities of Münster, Cologne, and Düsseldorf and since 2020 has been working as a research fellow at the Postcolonial Studies Section (Anglophone Studies) at the University of Duisburg-Essen. There, Katrin currently is pursuing her postdoc project ‘Narratives of Flight and Migration in Law and Literature,’ which is funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft.

From 2003 to 2005 she was a research assistant in the Collaborative Research Centre ‘Memory Cultures’ (University of Giessen, Germany). In 2003 she was granted a research stay at the Aboriginal Research and Resource Centre, University of New South Wales, Sydney. In 2008 her dissertation on culture-specific narrative stagings of remembering in contemporary novels by Indigenous authors from Australia, Canada and Aotearoa/New Zealand was published. She did research and worked in London, UK and Heraklion, Crete from 2007 to 2009. From 2012 to 2019 she was postdoc at the Department of English, American, and Celtic Studies, University of Bonn (with a research stay in Aotearoa/New Zealand in 2014). Research, teaching and publications focus on Indigenous Literatures and Cultures, Postcolonial Theories, Pacific Literatures, Narratologies and Memory Studies.

His PhD project, entitled “Twenty-First Century Vibes: Stimmung in Contemporary Anglophone Literature” explores new ways to figure affective presences wothin contemporary works. His work with Bettina Burger on integrating new digital media technologies technologies into teaching Australian Studies has led to two ELFF (Elearning Förderfond) awards as well as the 2021 Digi-Fellowship awarded by the state government of NRW. Their courses, centering around the Australian Fantastic  and Blogging, have so far reached over 200 students. He works and collaborates closely with Bettina Burger and David Kern.

He then worked as a journalist at the Australian Broadcasting Corporation in Adelaide, Sydney and Darwin before moving to Germany in 1996. In Germany, he has worked as a freelance writer, editor, translator and teacher. In 2009 he joined the English Department in Stuttgart, where he teaches courses on Australian literature and culture, African literature, and British literature and culture. His PhD, completed in 2016, examined the impact of the 1992 High Court Mabo decision on discourses of land and history in contemporary Australian fiction.

A trained Americanist, she is interested in the transnational entanglements of Atlantic slavery. While her previous work examined American antislavery literature and looked at, among other literary genres, German immigrant women’s fiction in the United States, her current research explores German immigrants’ recruitment to and involvement in Australia’s cotton and sugar economies and how Atlantic discourses of anti/slavery reverberated in multifaceted ways in German immigrant writings in Australia. She is also working with Emma Christopher (UNSW) on a project tentatively entitled “Atlantic Slavery’s Long Shadow in the Pacific.”

Entitled ‘Fielding Peter Carey’, his project accounts for a method of reading Carey’s oeuvre in relation to the promises and perils of the global publishing industry since the early 1970s.

He is interested in Carey’s work as part and product of the neo-liberal regime of publishing that has commodified his celebrity and his fiction. He has published on Carey’s archive and the literary field in JASAL. His forthcoming article on Carey’s Jack Maggs and world literature will be published in Antipodes later in 2018. His interview with the American-Australian writer Dominic Smith was published in Antipodes in June 2016. He also acted as the Postgraduate Representative of ASAL (Association for the Study of Australian Literature) between 2015 and 2018. He has taught in the areas of Australian literature, modern and contemporary literature and critical theory.

One of the first people in Germany working on postcolonial ecocriticism and, more recently, literary education for sustainability, he is the author and editor of more than 12 books and over 50 scholarly articles spanning environmental and transcultural learning, inclusive education, and the intersections of literature pedagogy and literary theory. Recent publications include Interkulturelles Lernen mit Literatur: Fokus Nigeria (as co-editor; Klett Kallmeyer 2020) and, as editor, Cultivating Sustainability in Language and Literature Pedagogy: Steps to an Educational Ecology (Routledge, 2021).  His current work explores the potential of literacy and the role of literary fiction in education for climate action as well as the role of dissent and controversy in culture-sensitive and inclusive educational settings. A particular interest in this is in non-Western climate imaginaries and educational practice of indigenous communities in Australia and disadvantaged people in India. Other interests include questions of educational philosophy, especially in terms of modelling learning objectives in times of large-scale extinction and climate catastrophe, literary value, the intersection of literary studies and literature pedagogy, and multimodal literature and media pedagogies.

Previously, she taught at the University of Cologne, where she obtained her Habilitation (2018) and her PhD (2010) and was a visiting researcher and lecturer at Murray Edwards College, University of Cambridge (2006-2007). She studied English, Media Studies, and Philosophy at Cologne, receiving her M.A. in 2006; she also holds a diploma in dance from the Rambert School/Brunel University, London. Since 2019, she has been general editor of ANGLISTIK: International Journal of English Studies.

Julia has a long-standing interest in postcolonial studies, with special focus on contemporary Anglophone Indian, African and Australian literatures and cultures. Since 2010, she has been an active member of the Association for Anglophone Postcolonial Studies (GAPS). Her doctoral dissertation focused on ethics and historiography in the works of Amitav Ghosh (published as Tackling the Morality of History. Amitav Ghosh and the Ethics of Storytelling, Winter 2011). She has published numerous articles on contemporary Indian fiction, diaspora, and black female speculative fiction. Among her recent books are the monograph Risk and the English Novel. From Defoe to McEwan (2019) as well as the co-edited volumes Representations of Science in Twenty-First Century Fiction: Human and Temporal Connectivities (Palgrave, 2019) and Teaching the Posthuman (Winter, 2019).

Her main research interests include literature and science (especially risk theory, climate change, posthumanism), intersections between gender and genre and between literature and other art forms (especially dance and theatre), transcultural adaptations studies, processes of canonization, and interactive digital narratives. She is currently working on a project in the field of historical gender studies funded by the Moderata Fonte-Forum of Early Modern Studies (2020-21), preparing a critical edition and translation of the works of the British author Margaret Cavendish (1623-1673).

Julia is also particularly interested in research at the intersection of the environmental humanities, postcolonial and performance studies. Forthcoming publications (2020/21) here include essays on Australian dance theatre (Anglistik Special Issue “Postcolonial Cultural Studies” 31.3) and on the Indigenous Hip Hop Projects; as well as book chapters on climate change drama (Research Handbook on Communicating Climate Change, Edward Elgar Research Handbook Series) and posthumanism and drama (Palgrave Handbook of Critical Posthumanism), which will include readings of the works of Australian dramatist, such as Stephen Carleton and Ian Meadows.

Her research interests combine didactic perspectives and literary/cultural criticism, focusing on the intersection between representations of identity and cultures in the context of school education. Her paper delivered at the conference “Nature and Environment in Australia” (Cologne, October 2016), “Australian Tropes of Nature: Representation and Appropriation in EFL Teaching” (forthcoming: pedocs, 2017), assesses the representation of Australian identity in English school teaching from a perspective of postcolonial scepticism concerning appropriate representation of cultures and identities in their complexity and fluidity.

This interest also extends to her academic teaching: “Teaching Australia in Postcolonial and Intercultural Perspective” (summer semester 2018) will explore the theoretical question of representing cultural identities in view of lesson and sequence planning for school teaching at lower and upper secondary levels, with a special focus on the genres of fiction and short film.

She was also involved in the organization and coordination of the Dr R Marika Chair for Australian Studies at the English Department of the University of Cologne (from 2010-2014).

Her research is dedicated to the study of the poetics and politics of Anglophone literatures, to world literatures and transcultural exchange, to postcolonial ecocriticism as well as to intermedial configurations in postcolonial fiction. She is author, co-author and editor of a range of books and articles that explore post/colonial modes of articulation in literature and film.

Her current research projects focus on the polycentric network of Anglophone world literatures and on postcolonial ekphrasis/ literary visuality. Together with Juergen Reulecke she is general editor of the series Forms of Remembering/Formen der Erinnerung (Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, since 2004). Recent publications include co-edited volumes on Anglophone World Literatures (Special Issue Anglia, 2017) and on Literary Environments: Ecocritical Theories and Ethics in Anglophone Literatures (anglistik & englischunterricht, 2018) as well as a number of articles on verbal-visual configurations in Anglophone Literatures. She is currently writing a monograph on Postcolonial Ekphrasis and Counter-Visions in Anglophone Literatures – Contacts, Contests and Translations.

Her main research interests are postcolonial studies and eighteenth-century British literature and culture in a comparative European perspective. She is the author of Die verordnete Kultur: Stereotypien der australischen Literaturkritik (1990) – a study of the history of literary criticism in Australia – and Die Kunst der Kritik (2000), a study on the third Earl of Shaftesbury’s concept of criticism. She has edited three collections of essays on aspects of cultural transfer in 18th-century Europe as well as an anthology of Contemporary Indian Short Stories (2006).

She has published numerous articles on postcolonial theory and literatures, especially on Australian literature and culture. She has recently edited, together with Elisabeth Bähr, a collection of essays by Australian and German scholars, ‘And there‘ll be NO dancing’: Perspectives on Policies Impacting Indigenous Australia since 2007 (Cambridge Scholars 2017). She has served on the board of the German Association for Australian Studies (GASt) and is a member of the association’s Academic Advisory Council.