Catherine Moir

Postgraduate Student and Tutor for German

I completed my undergraduate studies at the University of Sheffield, studying for a three-language BA in French, German and Spanish. After graduation, I went on to study for an MA in Translation Studies, also at the University of Sheffield, for which I received AHRC funding. My dissertation explored the concept of translatability in religious texts. Next I decided to study for a second MA, this time at the College of Europe in Bruges, Belgium, in European Politics and Administration, for which I received funding from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. Returning from Belgium, I worked for a year as a professional translator, before coming back to the Department of Germanic Studies at the University of Sheffield to prepare a doctoral thesis, again with AHRC funding, at the Centre for Ernst Bloch Studies. The thesis, which deals with the contemporaneity of Ernst Bloch’s speculative materialism, will be completed in 2013.

My research up to now has mainly been focused on the work and thought of Ernst Bloch in the historical context of modern German thought as well as in the contemporary perspective. I am currently based at the Forschungszentrum für Klassische Deutsche Philosophie at the Ruhr Universität Bochum undertaking a postdoctoral project, funded by the Leverhulme Trust, which grew out of my doctoral thesis in which I am investigating Ernst Bloch’s Hegel reception. The project will lead to a translation of Bloch’s monograph ‘Subjekt-Objekt. Erläuterungen zu Hegel,’ which will be published by Brill in the Bloch-Bibliothek, a series of translations of Bloch’s collected works and monographs on Bloch which forms part of the Historical Materialism book series and of which I am a co-editor. My other research interests include the history and culture of the GDR, German Expressionism, and the theory and philosophy of translation. I am also currently working with Laurence Hemming (IGRS, University of Lancaster) and Bogdan Costea (University of Lancaster) on a project dealing with theories of work in the context of which I am translating Ernst Jünger’s Der Arbeiter for the first time into English.

I have contributed to the department's undergraduate and postgraduate teaching programme and edited the faculty postgraduate journal, Track Changes. I was also the administrator for the Association for Low Countries Studies from 2010 to 2012 and have organised several conferences, including a postgraduate conference in collaboration with the University of Leeds in 2011 and a workshop at the Centre for Ernst Bloch Studies in 2010, ‘The Politics of Utopia: Marxism, Myth and Religion.’

List of publications

‘The Education of Hope: On the Dialectical Potential of Speculative Materialism’ in Peter Thompson and Slavoj Žižek (eds.), The Privatization of Hope (Duke University Press, forthcoming in 2013, accepted)

‘Beyond the Turn: Ernst Bloch and the Future of Speculative Materialism,’ in Poetics Today, special issue ‘No Future,’ (forthcoming in 2013, accepted)

‘Qu’est-ce que le matérialisme spéculatif? La contemporanéité d’Ernst Bloch,’ in Johan Siebers (ed.), Revue internationale de la philosophie (forthcoming in 2013, accepted)

‘Blochs Subjekt-Objekt: zur Genese eines Dokuments der deutschen Philosophie’ in Frank Degler (ed.), Bloch Almanach 32 (Mössingen-Talheim: Talheimer Verlag, forthcoming in 2013, accepted)

Review of Mikhail Krutikov, From Kabbalah to Class Struggle: Expressionism, Marxism and Yiddish Literature in the Life and Work of Meir Wiener (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011) in Marxism and Philosophy Review of Books, 2012

With J. Siebers. ‘Übersetzung als Utopie bei Bloch: Über die Schwierigkeit des Überschreitens,’ in Francesca Vidal (ed.), Bloch-Jahrbuch (Mössingen-Talheim: Talheimer Verlag, 2011), pp. 189-195

‘Revolution, Revelation and Reformation: Towards a Blochian Critique of East German Folk Atheism,’ in Track Changes (Summer 2011), pp. 93-113

Review of Julian Preece, Frank Finlay and Sinéad Crowe (eds.), Religion and Identity in Germany Today: Doubters, Believers and Seekers in Literature and Film (Bern: Peter Lang, 2011), in Focus on German Studies 18 (2011), pp. 141-144

‘Faith in Translation: Translational Resonance and Scriptural Representation in Islam and Christianity’ in Stephen Hutchings, Chris Flood, Galina Miazhevich and Henri Nickels (eds.) Islam in its International Context. Comparative Perspectives (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2011)

‘Translational Resonance: Authenticity and Authority in the Bible and the Quran’ in New Voices in Translation Studies 5 (2009), pp. 29-45

List of conference papers

‘“Falsch verstanden und doch verstanden”? Zu Ernst Blochs Hegel-Rezeption,’ Forschungszentrum für Klassische Deutsche Philosophie, Ruhr Universität Bochum, July 2013

‘Towards a Utopian Philosophy of Translation’, Institute of Germanic and Romance Studies work-in-progress seminar series, May 2012

‘What is Speculation? An Enquiry into a Philosophical Way of Seeing’, Ways of Seeing, University of Sheffield, May 2012

‘East German Folk Atheism’, Germanic Studies research seminar series, University of Sheffield, November 2011

‘The Future as Utopia: Ernst Bloch’s Dialectics of Secularisation’, No Future, University of Durham, March 2011

‘The “blaue Stunde” and the Past and Future of the GDR’, Remembering and Rethinking the GDR, University of Bangor, September 2010

‘Dreaming forwards: Bloch’s Freud Critique’, 47th National Postgraduate Colloquium in German Studies at the Institute of Germanic and Romance Studies, March 2010

‘Faith in Translation: Translational Resonance and Scriptural Representation in Islam and Christianity’, Representing Islam: Comparative Perspectives, University of Manchester, June 2009