Christina Littler

Additional Information

Teaching Areas:

Undergraduate

• GERM 30510 German Language
• GERM10350 German Cultural Studies
• LALC 20481 Translating New Writing
• GERM 30632 New German Identities: Turkish-German Culture
• LALC 10002 Introduction to World Cinema

Postgraduate

• MA in Languages and Cultures (by research) 
• MATIS supervision in German-English translation topics
• MAIC: I convene the course 'Border Crossings: Comparative Cultures of Diaspora' for the MA in Intercultural Communication

Research Students:

I am currently supervisor of one PhD Student, and have supervised ten PhDs to completion:

• Chris Gribble (2001) Theodor W. Adorno and Paul Celan
• Elaine Ellery (2006) German-Jewish Literary Expression in the Third Reich with particular reference to Gertrud Kolmar 
• Kate Roy (2008) Cartographies of Identity in the Works of Emine Sevgi Özdamar and Leila Sebbar
• Pauline Eyre (2010) Permission to Speak: Representations of the Disabled Body in German Women's Literature of the 1970s and 1980s
• Rachel Ramsay (2010) Jewish and Turkish Encounters in Contemporary German Language Literature
• Leanne Dawson (2009) Femme: Representations of Queer Femininities in Post-War German Culture
• Ahmet Alver (2012) The Politics of Memory: Aesthetics and Narrative in March 12th Novels
• Sevinc Elaman (2012) Gender Roles and the Image of “New Woman” in the Works of Halide Edip Advar and Edith Wharton
• Gözde Naiboglu (2015)Beyond Representation: Ethics and Aesthetics of Representation in Turkish-German Cinema since Reunification
• Joseph Twist  (2015) From Gastarbeiter to Muslim: Cosmopolitan Literary Responses to post-9/11 Islamophobia
• William Hall Space and Time in the works of Hoffmann and Kleist
   

I have taught at Manchester University since 1990, was promoted to Senior Lecturer in 1998, and to Professor in 2006. I was Director of Graduate Studies in the former Faculty of Arts (1998-2001), and have continued to be centrally involved in postgraduate teaching and supervision. I am on the editorial board of the leading UK journal in German Studies,  German Life and Letters, and regularly review articles for other journals (The German Quarterly, Seminar, Gegenwartsliteratur). I was a founder member of Women in German Studies and organised its 10th anniversary conference in Manchester in 1998, and I have been actively involved in the Internationale Verein für Germanistik (attending its conferences in Vancouver 1995, Vienna 2000,  Paris 2005 and Warsaw 2010). In Vienna 2000 I co-chaired the panel Geschlechtsforschung und Literaturwissenschaft. From 2006-2008 I was co-director of the AHRC-funded Migration and Diaspora Cultural Studies Network in Manchester. From 2012-2015 I was Germanic Studies representative on the Executive Committee of the University Council for Modern Languages (UCML), and I was President of the Association for German Studies in the UK and Ireland (AGS) from 2017-2020.

My research has long been shaped by an interest in migration:  I am completing a book project on Turkish German minority culture, and a co-edited volume on small,  minority and minor literatures in Europe. In both projects my work is informed by the materialist philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, which offers a non-dualistic conceptual framework to approach both issues of cultural difference and disciplinary boundaries. Deleuze's philosophy offers a perspective on 'minor' culture as a transformative force in national cultures, and a way of conceptualising the dynamic interdependence of science, philosophy and the arts. This thinking informs my view of postmigrant culture as transformative and boundary-transgressing, crossing both national boundaries and those between science, technology and the arts. My research has always been concerned with the interface between philosophy and culture. In the areas of post-1945 German Literature, Contemporary Women's Writing, and now migration and minority cultures, I have sought new approaches through a multi-disciplinary, cultural studies framework. My doctoral research on the influence of French phenomenology on the work of Alfred Andersch revised the popular perception that Sartrean existentialism was the dominant post-War philosophical trend in the Federal Republic. In my work on German women's writing, I was committed to developing new methodologies as well as to extending the canon of German literature. This culminated in the co-authored volume Contemporary Women's Writing in German: Changing the Subject (with Brigid Haines, OUP 2004). In my current work on diaspora cultures in German, my concern is not just with inter-cultural communication, but with the redefinition of German culture itself. From 2006 to 2008 I was co-director with Encarnación Gutiérrez Rodríguez  of the AHRC-funded Migration and Diaspora Cultural Studies Network (MDCSN). The Network ran a series of three workshops over two years, and a conference, 'Creolising Europe', in September 2007. In 2009 I co-organised two EU-funded workshops on Creating the Cosmopolitan City with Professor Nina Glick-Schiller, and in 2010 I co-organised a workshop on 'Translating Science'. In 2015 I curated an exhibition at Manchester's Central Library on 'Germans in Manchester', which is due to become an on-line exhibition.

Click on the highlighted link for a list of publications