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.