Ben Schofield is Senior Lecturer in German at King’s College London. He joined King’s in 2008 as Lecturer in German and Comparative Literature, having previously held positions at the University of Cambridge (as Associate Lecturer in Dutch and German) and the Institute of Modern Languages Research (as Lecturer in Modern German Culture).
His most recent research has focused on the representation and perception of German and European identity and culture extra muros, that is to say in global contexts. His particular interest is in the processes and infrastructures that promote, challenge and define notions of cultural identity within mechanisms of transnational circulation. His work encompasses traditional literary and cultural-historical studies, performance studies, and the intersection between cultural studies and European cultural policy/cultural diplomacy. He is currently working on a monograph A Moral Compass: The Germanic Tradition in American Fiction, which assesses both the mechanisms that underpin, and the aesthetic ramifications, of German-US cultural interaction from the post-war period onwards. His other area key of interest is the cultural relationship between Germany, Europe and Shakespeare, reflected in his ongoing project Import/Export: Staging “Unser Shakespeare”. His previous research focused predominantly on questions of German identity, German Realism, and the German culture industry, and he is the author of the monograph Private Lives and Collective Destinies. Class, Nation and the Folk in the Works of Gustav Freytag, and the co-edited volumes The German Bestseller in the Late Nineteenth Century and The Racehorse of Genius. Literary and Cultural Comparisons.
As part of the Beyond Enemy Lines project, he is supervising the PhD project of Julia Vossen on the comparative history of British and German “Rubble Literature”, together with the project-lead, Dr Lara Feigel. His particular interest within the project’s themes is in the mechanisms that underpinned author-exchanges between England/America and Germany/Austria in the post-war period; the consequences of this infrastructural process on the works produced and their aesthetic; and the cross-fertilisation of English/American and German/Austrian texts through their translation, transnational exchange, and mutual influence.

Dr Emily Oliver joined the English Department at King’s College in November 2013 as Postdoctoral Research Associate for Beyond Enemy Lines. She has previously taught at the University of Birmingham, and as International Courses Lead Practitioner at the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust in Stratford-upon-Avon. Having completed all her secondary education in Germany, Emily graduated with a BA in Drama and Creative Writing from Royal Holloway (University of London) in 2007. She gained an MA in Shakespeare Studies (2009) and a PhD on Shakespeare and German Reunification (2013) from the Shakespeare Institute (University of Birmingham). Her work within the current project focuses on the reception of British, American and German literature, theatre and film in the press immediately after the Second World War.

Christopher Knowles was awarded his PhD in February 2014, after studying the British occupation of Germany as a part-time research student at the Institute of Contemporary British History at Kings College, London. He adopted a biographical approach to research twelve important and influential British people who worked for the Control Commission or Military Government in Germany, for his thesis Winning the Peace: The British in occupied Germany, 1945-1948, supervised by Professor Pat Thane at King’s College and Professor Bernd Weisbrod at Göttingen. He is now a Visiting Research Associate at King’s College.

Robert Weninger was educated both in Britain and Germany. He studied German, English and Philosophy at Frankfurt University. He joined the Department of German at King’s College London as Chair of German in the summer of 2003. He is a member of the ‘International Advisory Board’ of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (Akademie der Wissenschaften), Institut für Kulturwissenschaften und Theatergeschichte, and is also an Editorial Board Member of the specialist journal Der Bargfelder Bote, which is devoted to the work of Arno Schmidt. From 2006 to 2011 Robert Weninger served as editor of Comparative Critical Studies (Edinburgh University Press), the peer-reviewed house-journal of the British Comparative Literature Association. He has published six single-authored monographs, one bibliography, and has edited or co-edited a further twelve volumes. His most recent book, The German Joyce, a study of the reception of James Joyce in German literature, appeared in August 2012 with the University of Florida Press.

Dr Elaine Morley joined King’s College, London in January 2014 as a European Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow on ‘Beyond Enemy Lines’ which investigates the cultural reconstruction of Germany after the Second World War. She has previously held positions as Associate Lecturer in German and Comparative literature at the University of Kent, Canterbury and as Lecturer in Comparative Literature (German and English) at Queen Mary, University of London where she convened the MA in Anglo-German Cultural Relations. Elaine holds degrees in Irish, German and Comparative literature (English and German). She is investigating the evolution of the idea of Europe, its connection to the concepts of cosmopolitanism, internationalism and transnationalism, and organisations (International PEN and UNESCO) and individuals whose work promotes these concepts, as well as British literary reflections on Europe and European culture.

Research Interests

• Europe and European culture in twentieth century British writing
• Anglo-German encounters, exchange and transfer
• Theories of transnationalism, cosmopolitanism, culture transfer, post-colonialism
• Comparative literature

Translation

• Sven Hanuschek, ‘“Dwarf helicopters that land on bald heads”: Literary Nonsense in Canetti’, in The Worlds of Elias Canetti: Centenary Essays, ed. by William Collins Donahue & Julian Preece (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007)

Reviews

• Anne Peiter, Komik und Gewalt: Zur Literarischen Verarbeitung der beiden Weltkriege und der Shoah (Cologne: Böhlau, 2007), Modern Language Review, January 2009
• Daniel Fass, Negotiating Political Identities (Surrey: Ashgate, 2010), Journal of Contemporary European Studies, December 2010
• Iris Murdoch and Her Work: Critical Essays, ed. by Mustafa Krca and Şule Okuroğlu (Stuttgart: Ibidem-Verlag, 2010), The Iris Murdoch Review, March 2011

Erica Carter is Professor of German at King’s College, London. She started her research career as a student at the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, then moved from the centre to co-found a translation cooperative, Material Word.  Following a later stint as Director of Talks at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, she returned to academic life, and has since researched, published and taught widely on German cultural and film studies and cultural history. Her works include the topics gender and consumption (How German is She? 1997), German cinema (The German Cinema Book, 2002) and Third Reich film aesthetics (Dietrich’s Ghosts, 2004). Her current work is moving away from an exclusive focus on things German, and towards questions of transnationalism in cultural studies and cultural history. Her recent projects focus on European culture under fascist occupation, on German-speaking exile audiences in Britain and the Empire after 1933, and on the early film theory (Béla Balázs: Early Film Theory, 2010). The volume was the subject of a conference organized in conjunction with the film journal Screen to mark their 50th anniversary in 2009, and was launched with an exhibition on Balázs at the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) in 2010. Since September 2010, she has been working on a new project on colonial melodrama that uses work on the melodramatic sensibility to explore the cultural experience of German-speaking émigré women in the British colonial territories after the Second World War.

Lara Feigel is a Senior Lecturer in English at King’s College London whose research is centred on literature in the late modernist period, focusing particularly on the 1930s and the Second World War and its aftermath.  Her first monograph Literature, Cinema, Politics, 1930-1945, Reading Between the Frames (Edinburgh University Press, 2010) tells the story that unfolded between 1920s cinematic modernism and postwar cinematic neorealism, exploring the rise and fall of a distinct genre of politically committed, cinematic literature.  Her second book entitled The Love-charm of Bombs: Restless Lives in the Second World War (Bloomsbury, 2013) explores the wartime lives and writing of five writers (Elizabeth Bowen, Henry Green, Graham Greene, Rose Macaulay, Hilde Spiel). She is also the co-editor (with John Sutherland) of the New Selected Journals of Stephen Spender (Faber, 2012) and (with Alexandra Harris) of a collection of essays exploring modernist aesthetic responses to the seaside (Modernism on Sea, Peter Lang, 2009). At King’s she is the co-director (with Erica Carter) of the Centre for Modern Literature and Culture.  Lara is the Principal Investigator on Beyond Enemy Lines and is working on a monograph about the British and American writers and filmmakers who were involved in the reconstruction of Germany, 1945-1949.