Dr Ellen Pilsworth

Broadly speaking, I am interested in literature of politics and protest from the eighteenth century to the present. My research has mainly focussed on German literature from ca. 1750-1815, and Anglo-German publishing in interwar period and during the Second World War, but I am also interested in the protest literature of the German ‘1968’. My work has covered or touched on the following themes:

• Literary responses to war (1750-1815, and twentieth century)
• Constructions of identity, especially national identity
• Cultural memory and confronting violent pasts (war, the Holocaust, colonialism)
• Political poetry, protest literature
• 18th-century ideologies of gender, and women’s writing
• German Romanticism
• German and Austrian Exile publishing in the 1930s and 40s
• Histories and legacies of Fascism and anti-fascism
• Autobiographical writing (poetry and memoirs) and theories of authorship

Since April 2020 I have led the project ‘Knowing the Nazis, Inside and Out: Anti-Fascist Publishing in Austria, Germany and Britain, 1927-40’, generously funded by the British Academy and Wolfson Foundations. The project investigates the reception of English-language publications and broadcasts by Germans and Austrians who fled to Britain and opposed National Socialism from their position of exile.