Research Interests

An early research interest, connected with my work on South African fiction, was the representation of Africa and Africans in nineteenth century British adventure fiction (Ballantyne, Conrad, Haggard, Henty).

In 2008, I was granted a EU-funded Marie Curie Intra-European Fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (external link, opens in a new window) at the Unviersity of Edinburgh, to examine the representation of natural science in periodicals for young readers, published between 1847 and 1900. The research project was scheduled to run for two years (2009 and 2010), but had to be terminated after 15 months when I was appointed Professor of British Literature and Cultural Studies at the University of Regensburg. The data collected in Edinburgh has led to a number of publications.

I started working on South African literature in the late 1990s; my main research interest was at first connected with the interdependencies of 'history' and 'identity', and it led to my doctoral thesis Re-imagining White Identity by Exploring the Past (external link, opens in a new window)(Trier: WVT, 2002). More recently, focus has shifted towards the representation of South Africa's cities and their 'problems' (eg. migration/immigration, violence, HIV/AIDS). Most recently, I published a biography of South African Nobel laureate Nadine Gordimer, Nadine Gordimer: Eine starke Stimme gegen die Apartheid (external link, opens in a new window), (that includes an introduction to her oeuvre and to South Africa's political history) on the occasion of Gordimer's centenary in 2023.

In my Habilitationsschrift, Sprechsituationen lyrischer Dichtung: Ein Beitrag zur Gattungstypologie (external link, opens in a new window) (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2013), I use an approach based on cognitive science to examine genre theory, more specifically the theory of (lyrical) poetry. In connection with this research theme, I was awarded funding by the German Research Foundation (DFG) for a project examining the speaker position in a large selection of poems written in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The final report (external link, opens in a new window) can be downloaded as a pdf (in German).

More recently, my interest in poetic genres has led to the publication of A History of the Sonnet in England: "A little world made cunningly" (external link, opens in a new window) (Berlin: Schmidt, 2022).