Nina Schmidt
Postgraduate Student and Tutor for German
Email: n.schmidt@sheffield.ac.uk
I first came to The University of Sheffield as an Erasmus student in 2007-08, when I was studying toward a BA in English and German philology. I completed both my BA and MA in Germany at the Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster. For both degrees I was awarded a scholarship from the Friedrich Naumann Foundation. My BA dissertation analysed German Väterbücher by Christoph Meckel and Wibke Bruhns; in my MA thesis, I examined the representation of trauma in contemporary Native American literature. Alongside my studies, I have taught English and German in schools and at universities, and worked as a freelance journalist. On completing my studies in August 2011, I moved to England to teach German at a private boarding school for a year.
In September 2012, I returned to The University of Sheffield to begin a Ph.D. thesis (funded by a University of Sheffield Faculty Scholarship). The Ph.D., focusing on contemporary illness narratives, is jointly supervised by Dr. Caroline Bland (Germanic Dept.) and Prof. Sue Vice (School of English).
My thesis is motivated by a notable recent increase in publications of autobiographical writing on illness and death in the German-speaking world. Texts to be analysed to date include Charlotte Roche’s Schoßgebete, Arno Geiger’s Der alte König in seinem Exil and Christoph Schlingensief’s So schön wie hier kann’s im Himmel gar nicht sein!. My research interests therefore lie in auto/biography and life writing (autofiction, diary), disability theory, the field of literature and medicine, the representation of trauma, cancer and Alzheimer’s in literature, as well as the sociology of health and illness.
Within Germanic Studies, I teach German conversation classes across all levels.
List of publications
‘Autofiction and Trauma: Negotiating Vulnerable Subject Positions in Charlotte Roche’s Schoßgebete,’ in Auto/Fiction 1.1 (forthcoming in 2013)
Book Review: ‘Debating German Cultural Identity since 1989’, Deutsch: Lehren und Lernen, Issue 48 (forthcoming in 2013)
List of academic papers
“‘[I]mmer so ekelhafte Gedanken’ – Illness, Death and the Female Grotesque in Charlotte Roche’s Schoßgebete”, Institute of Germanic and Romance Studies, Centre for the Study of Contemporary Women's Writing (CCWW) Seminar on ‘The Aesthetics of Disgust: Revolting Bodies and Other Gruesome Things in post-1990 Women's Writing’, 26 June 2013
“‘[E]ndlich normal geworden’? – Reassembling an Image of the Self in Kathrin Schmidt’s Du stirbst nicht”, University of Nottingham, Postgraduate Summer School in German Studies on ‘Norms, Normality, Normalisation’, funded by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), 2-6 July 2013
