German publications

Benbow, Heather and Perry, Heather (eds.,). Food, Culture and Identity in Germany's Century of War. Palgrave Macmillan, 2019.
Benbow, Heather and Perry, Heather. “Hunger Pangs: The Contours of Violence and Food Scarcity in Germany’s Twentieth-Century Wars,” in Benbow, Heather and Perry, Heather (eds.,). Food, Culture and Identity in Germany's Century of War. Palgrave Macmillan, 2019.
Benbow, Heather. “Food, Drink and Hunger for World War I German Soldiers,” in Benbow, Heather and Perry, Heather (eds.,). Food, Culture and Identity in Germany's Century of War. Palgrave Macmillan, 2019.

Even in the harsh conditions of total war, food is much more than a daily necessity, however scarce – it is social glue and an identity marker, a form of power and a weapon of war. This collection examines the significance of food and hunger in Germany’s turbulent twentieth century. Food-centered perspectives and experiences “from below” reveal the social, cultural and political consequences of three conflicts that defined the twentieth century: the First and Second World Wars and the ensuing global Cold War. More information...

Benbow, Heather. "Transnational Turkish German Travelogues: Turkish German Women Writers' Millennial Travelogues," in Schafi, M. and Baumgartner, K. (eds.,). Anxious Journeys Twenty-First-Century Travel Writing in German. Camden House, 2019.

The rich contemporary literature of travel has been the focus of numerous recent publications in English that seek to understand how travel narratives respond to today's globalised, high-speed world characterised by the dual mass movements of tourism and migration. Yet a corresponding cutting-edge discussion of twenty-first-century travel writing in German has until now been missing. The fourteen essays in Anxious Journeys redress this situation. More information...

Glajar, Valentina; Lewis, Alison and Petrescu, Corina L. (eds.,). Cold War Spy Stories from Eastern Europe. Nebraska Press, 2019.

The opening of secret police archives in many Eastern European countries has provided the opportunity to excavate and narrate for the first time forgotten spy stories. Cold War Spy Stories from Eastern Europe brings together a wide range of accounts compiled from the East German Stasi, the Romanian Securitate, and the Ukrainian KGB files. The stories are a complex amalgam of fact and fiction, history and imagination, past and present. These stories of collusion and complicity, betrayal and treason, right and wrong, and good and evil cast surprising new light on the question of Cold War certainties and divides. More information...

Lewis, Alison. “The Prenzlauer Berg Underground: orderly Anarchism, Anarchic Order and Simulated Anarchism,” in Magerski, Christine and Roberts, David (eds.,). Kulturrebellen – Studien zur anarchistischen Moderne. Springer VS, 2019.

The starting point of this volume is the unique historical moment of anarchism in the first decades of the 20th century with regard not only to its political, but above all to its cultural significance. Anarchism became the creative and destructive principle of the avant-garde movements that arose from the ever more acute crisis of the European order and civil society of those years. The avant-garde moment, carried by a European intelligentsia between aesthetic protest and political revolt, aimed at overcoming the boundaries between art, life and politics and sparked a search for new possibilities in art as well as for new, anti-bourgeois, social and sexual liberation promising forms of life, from artist colonies to political communities. More information...

Rizzi, Andrea, Lang, Birgit and Pym, Anthony. What is Translation History? A Trust-Based Approach. Palgrave, 2019.

This book presents a dynamic history of the ways in which translators are trusted and distrusted. Working from this premise, the authors develop an approach to translation that speaks to historians of literature, language, culture, society, science, translation and interpreting. By examining theories of trust from sociological, philosophical, and historical studies, and with reference to interdisciplinarity, the authors outline a methodology for approaching translation history and intercultural mediation from three discrete, concurrent perspectives on trust and translation: the interpersonal, the institutional and the regime-enacted. More information...

Kretzenbacher, Leo. "Approaches to Bach in Australian literature," in Collins, D., Murphy, K. and Owens, S. (eds.,). J.S. Bach in Australia: Studies in Reception and Performance. Lyrebird Press, 2018.

This book is the first to be dedicated to a study of the reception of a European composer in Australia. Each of the eleven essays explores how J.S. Bach's music has enriched Australian cultural life, from private performances in the early nineteenth century to historically informed realisations in recent years. The authors outline the challenges of mounting and sustaining this repertoire in the face of underdeveloped musical infrastructure and limited resources, and how these challenges have been overcome with determination and insight. More information...

Benbow, Heather. "Discourses of "Rescue" and "Exit" in Gay Turkish-German Coming-of-Age Novels," in Bandhauer, A., Lay, T., Lü, Y. and Morgan, P. (eds.,). Die Welt auf Deutsch: Fremdenbilder und Selbstentwürfe in der deutschsprachigen Literatur und Kultur. Röhrig Universitätsverlag, 2017.

What is the "self" and the "foreign" in the age of globalisation? How should a culture or a nation define itself and how would individuals deal with questions of identity in a world in which the belonging to a culture or to a nation no longer provides relatively stable categories for the formation and articulation of identity? This book provides in-depth analysis of literary and biographical texts, film and performance practices in the German speaking countries from the 17th century to the present and offers a study of the links and demarcations between language, culture and identity. More information...

Lewis, Alison. "Writing in the Cold War," in Webber, Andrew J. (ed.,). The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of Berlin. Cambridge University Press, 2017.

This collection of essays by international specialists in the literature of Berlin provides a lively and stimulating account of writing in and about the city in the modern period. The first eight chapters chart key chronological developments from 1750 to the present day, while subsequent chapters focus on Berlin drama and poetry in the twentieth century and explore a set of key identity questions: ethnicity/migration, gender (writing by women), and sexuality (queer writing). More information...

Lang, B., Damousi, J. and Lewis, A. A history of the case study: sexology, psychoanalysis, literature. Manchester University Press, 2017.

This collection tells the story of the case study genre at a time when it became the genre par excellence for discussing human sexuality across the humanities and life sciences. It is a transcontinental journey from the imperial world of fin-de-siécle Central Europe to the interwar metropolises of Weimar Germany and to the United States of America in the post-war years. More information...

Kretzenbacher, Lewis. "Sprachenwahl und metasprachliche Kommentare bei deutsch-englischen Peer-Reviews," in Kalverkämper, H. (ed.,). Fachkommunikation im Fokus: Paradigmen, Positionen, Perspektiven. Frank and Timme, 2016.

The specialist communication research that has emerged from specialist language research can claim numerous groundbreaking findings in the range of topics. Paradigmatically, it is closely linked to the methods of interdisciplinarity. In her Wissenschafts position she oscillates between linguistics, translation studies, subject research and cultural studies as an independent discipline with a focus on practical application. It is sensitive to the needs of the public and offers creative perspectives for professional communication and translation into other cultures. More information...

Lang, Birgit and Lewis, Alison et al. Limbus - Australisches Jahrbuch für germanistische Literatur- und Kulturwissenschaft: Band 9 (2016): Besuch / Visitation. Rombach Druck - und Verlagshaus, 2016.

A global network is indispensable for the profiling of a scientific discipline such as German studies, especially in a country like Australia, whose geostrategic situation does not reflect the obviousness of a strong Germanist research in the same way as in the European area. This requirement should be taken into account by the Australian Yearbook for German Literature and Cultural Studies Limbus. More information...

Benbow, H. Marriage in Turkish German Popular Culture: States of Matrimony in the New Millennium. Lexington Books, 2015.

This book documents the significance of marriage in 21st-century Turkish-German culture, unpacking its implications not only for the cultural portrayals of those of Turkish background, but also for understandings of German identity. It sheds light on the interactions of gender, sexuality and ethnicity in contemporary Germany. More information...

In collaboration with Kretzenbacher, Heinz L. and Bissoonauth, Anu; Rudolf, M. and Dawn, M. (eds.,). Pluricentric languages : new perspectives in theory and description. Peter Lang, 2015.

This volume presents a selection of papers from the "3rd International Conference on Non-Dominant Varieties of Pluricentric Languages" that was held in 2014 at the University of Surrey, Guildford (UK). The papers in section one deal with the theoretical aspects of pluricentricity and methods of description of the variations in pluricentric languages. Section two contains a number of papers about "new" pluricentric languages and "new" non-dominant varieties that have not been described before. Section three showcases pluricentric languages that are used alongside indigenous languages and section four deals with the pluricentricity of special languages. More information...