Professor Anne Fuchs

Professor of German Studies

Director of Research, School of Modern Languages and Cultures

Tel: 24418

Email: A dot Fuchs at warwick dot ac dot uk

H2.18, Humanities Building, University Road, University of Warwick, Coventry CV4 7AL

About

Prof Anne Fuchs (MRIA, FBA) studied German and English Literature at the University of Konstanz, Trinity College Dublin and the Freie Universität Berlin. Her PhD examined the role of humour in the works of the Swiss writer Robert Walser. After three years as DAAD-Lektorin at UCL, she moved to Ireland in 1992. Between 1992-2010 she was Lecturer, Senior Lecturer and then Professor of Modern German Literature and Culture at University College Dublin where she co-founded the UCD Humanities Institute in 2002, funded by the Programme for Research in Third Level Institutions in Ireland (PRTLI 3). From 2002 – 2007 she was Principal Investigator of the five-year Research Programme “German Memory Contests since 1945”, funded by PRTLI3. In 2004 and 2005 she directed the UCD Humanities Institute with responsibility for the PhD programme and the implementation of the interdisciplinary research programme on Memory and Meaning in the 21Century. In 2005/6 she received an IRCHSS Senior Research Fellowship, which enabled her to carry out research for her fourth monograph Phantoms of War in Contemporary German Literature, Films and Discourse. The award of a UCD Senior Fellowship in 2010 helped her to complete her research on After the Dresden Bombing: Pathways of Memory, 1945 to the Present. In 2011 she accepted the Chair of German at the University of St Andrews before moving to Warwick in January 2012.

Research interests

Her research addresses German cultural memory since 1945, German literature in the 20th and 21st centuries, German-Jewish literature, modernism, and travel writing from the 18th century. For a number of years her research focused on “German memory contests”, i.e. a series of intensely fought public debates about German cultural identity in the aftermath of the Holocaust, World War II and unification. The growing distance to the Nazi past and unification have led to a new memory contest that concerns the legacy of the GDR and of the old Federal Republic in the context of globalisation. After the Dresden Bombing, Pathways of Memory 1945 to the Present (2012) investigates these issues from an interdisciplinary perspective with reference to the local, national and global memory of the bombing of Dresden.

Her current research concerns the experience of historical acceleration at the beginning of the 21 century. The inability to determine the speed of social and economic developments through conventional legislation and planning in western democracy was underlined by the events in the wake of the financial crash of 2008. Indeed, the premium placed on speed and the constant drive towards innovation raise the question of how cultural connectivity to places and traditions can be assured under such radically new conditions. She was co-organiser (with Jonathan Long, Durham University) of an international conference on 'Faster than Light? Historical Experience, Placed Identity and Memory in the Age of Historical Acceleration' which was held at the Institute of Advanced Studies at the University of Warwick from 7 – 9 March 2012. This was followed by second confernce on The Longing for Time: Ästhetische Eigenzeit in Contemporary German Literature, Film and Art, held at the Kulturiwssenschaftliche Kolleg, Universität Konstanz , 15-17 May 2014 in collaboration with Prof. Aleida Assmann.

Teaching and supervision

Undergraduate Modules:

Postgraduate Modules:

IT914 Critical Theory in Modern Languages (team-taught)
German Studies PHD Reading Group
MA Guided Studies Options

Research Supervision

She has an established track record as PhD and postgraduate supervisor with PhD supervisions in areas such as German-Jewish literature, modernism and fin-de-siècle literature, contemporary German and Austrian Literature, German cultural memory since 1945, contemporary German literature, ästhetische Eigenzeit, the expwrience of time in the digital era. She welcome enquiries from students interested in any of the areas listed above.

Administrative roles

Director of Research in the School of Modern Langauges and Cultures
Director of Research in German Studies
Convenor for the German Studies Research Workshop

Selected publications

Monographs:

(2012), After the Dresden Bombing: Pathways of Memory, 1945 to the Present. Basingstoke, Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 276.
(2008, 2nd paperback ed. 2010), Phantoms of War in Contemporary German Literature, Films and Discourse: the Politics of Memory. Basingstoke, Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan; pp. 254. (Winner of the CHOICE “Outstanding Academic Title” 2008; reviewed in: Choice. Current Reviews for Academic Libraries. August 2008, Deutschland Archiv 6 (2008), 1137-1138; Journal of European Studies 39 (2009), 259-261; Modern Language Review 105 (2010): 292-94, Monatshefte 101/4(2009): 610-12, The German Studies Review 32/3 (2009): 714-15.
(2004), ‘Die Schmerzensspuren der Geschichte’. Zur Poetik der Erinnerung in W.G. Sebalds Prosa. Weimar, Vienna, Cologne: Böhlau, pp. 258. (Reviewed in: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 21/4/2005; IASL online 11/5/2005, literaturkritik.de 4/4/2005, titel. Magazin 21/8/2005, Modern Language Review 100.4 (2005), p. 1157, Germanistik in Ireland. Yearbook of the Association of Third Level Teachers of German in Ireland 1 (2006), pp. 115-16; Études Germaniques 61 (2006), pp. 301-02; Journal of European Studies 101 (2007, pp. 101-103; Germanistische Mitteilungen 65(2007), pp. 86-91). Chapter 1 ‘Für eine Ethik der Erinnerung - Kulturelles Gedächtnis: Versuch einer Begriffsklärung’ has been selected for W. G. Sebald. Neue Wege der Forschung, eds Yahya Elsaghe, Luca Liechti and Oliver Lubrich (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2012).

Edited volumes:

(2015), Time in German Literature and Culture, 1900-2015. Between Slowness and Acceleration, eds. Anne Fuchs and Jonathan Long. Palgrave/Macmillan (Palgrave Series in Modern European Literature).
(2012) ‘Transformations of German Cultural Identity 1989-2009’, special issue new german critique 116 vol. 39, eds Anne Fuchs and Kathleen James-Chakraborty.
(2011), Debating German Cultural Identity since 1989, eds Anne Fuchs, Kathleen James-Chakraborty, Linda Shortt. Rochester: Camden House, pp. 256.

Articles and book chapters:

(2014) An Awareness of What is Missing: Voyeurism and the Remediation of Transcendence in Arnold Stadler’s Sehnsucht and Salvatore. German Life & Letters 67/3 (forthcoming).
(2014) After the Flâneur: Temporality and Connectivity in Wilhelm Genazino’s Belebung der toten Winkel and Das Glück in glücksfernen Zeiten. Modern Language Review 109/2: 435-450.
(2013), Entschleunigte Räume in der deutschen Literatur der Gegenwart. In: Silke Horstkotte and Leonhard Herrmann (eds), Poetologien der Gegenwartsliteratur. Berlin: De Gruyter, pp. 209-223.
(2012), Psychotopography and Ethnopoetic Realism in Uwe Tellkamp’s Der Turm, special issue ‘Transformations of German Cultural Identity 1989- 2009’, new german critique 116 vol. 39 (2012): 119-132.
(2012), Ostalgia, Local Identity and the Quest for Heimat in the Global Age: Julia Schoch’s Mit der Geschwindigkeit des Sommers and Judith Zander’s Dinge, die wir heute sagten. In: Friederike Eigler and Jens Kugele (eds), Heimat: At the Intersection of Space and Memory. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2012, pp. 125-139.

Professional associations and distinctions

she is a member of the International Editorial Board of Germanistische Mitteilungen, of the general editorial board of Legenda and a member of the editorial board of the Germanic Literatures Series (Legenda). She is a member of the Royal Irish Academy and a Fellow of the British Academy.

Qualifications

1991 Universität Konstanz, Germany: Dr. phil.
1988 Universität Konstanz, Germany: M.A. in German and English
1987 Universität Konstanz, Germany: First State Examination in German and English.

Office hours

Wednesday 10- 12am

Or by appointment

Teaching

Undergraduate modules

GE214-15 The Strange World of Franz Kafka's Short Stories

GE312 The Writer and Imperial Germany 1871-1918
GE334 The Self and the Others II: Contemporary German Travel Narratives
GE337 Kafka's Modernism

Postgraduate modules

IT914 Critical Theory in Modern Languages (team-taught)
German Studies PHD Reading Group
MA Guided Studies Options