Professor Rebecca Braun

Current Teaching

GERM233 - Post-War German-Language Culture and Identities (convenor)

DELC351 - Literature and Fame in Contemporary Germany (convenor)

DELC401 - Research Skills for Modern Linguists

Research Interests

I am interested in conceptualising and analysing how authors - and with them literature - exist within the world.

My forthcoming monograph, provisionally entitled 'Authors and the World: Placing Literature in Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Germany', focuses on the literary strategies devised by a representative selection of well-known authors from the 1960s to the present for negotiating their own publicly constructed identity, as well as considering the changing social and cultural contexts of authorship over the period. In other recent publications I have focused particularly on ideas of literary celebrity, world authorship, and the mass mediation of highbrow authors in popular media.

All of this work feeds into interdisciplinary research hub, 'Authors and the World' (www.authorsandtheworld.com), which I founded in 2014 with a Research Leadership Fellowship from the AHRC. This ongoing initiative allows me to develop my conceptual interest in authorship with colleagues working in various different disciplines at Lancaster and other international institutions.

I am Co-Director of Lancaster University's Institute for Social Futures, where I lead on Creative Futures. This entails working across campus to design projects that fuse expertise from the Arts and Humanities with Science and Technology. See http://www.lancaster.ac.uk/social-futures

I am also Director of Research in the Department of Languages & Cultures, which entails managing a broad portfolio of diverse research projects. See http://www.lancaster.ac.uk/european-languages/research/

Additional Information

Research Grants Awarded

2014-2016: AHRC Early Career Fellowship to fund the project and associated interdisciplinary research hub, 'The Author and the World: New Interdisciplinary Approaches to Authorship'.

2011-2014: Lancaster Early Career Grant, to support a series of research trips to literary and media archives in Germany to develop work on my second monograph and associated peer-reviewed articles and chapters in edited volumes.

2007-2009: Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship, held at the University of Liverpool, to begin work on my second monograph, provisionally entitled Writing Life: The Making of the Author in Germany's Media Age.

2002-2005: University of Oxford Scatcherd Scholarship to provide fees and living expenses for my doctorate, since published with Oxford University Press as Constructing Authorship in the Work of Günter Grass.

2001-2002: Alexander von Humboldt scholarship, extraordinarily granted by the University of Oxford Theodor Heuss selection committee, to allow me to begin work on my doctorate, attached to the Freie Universität, Berlin.

Editorial and Peer-Reviewer Roles

Editor: German Life & Letters

International Editorial Board: Gegenwartsliteratur

Book proposals peer-review: De Gruyter

Article peer-review: Austrian Studies, Celebrity Studies, Edinburgh German Yearbook, Focus on German Studies, German Quarterly, Phrasis, Seminar

Book reviews: Journal of European Studies, Forum for Modern Language Studies, German Quarterly, The Modern Language Review, Times Higher Education Supplement

Membership of Associations

Association for German Studies in Great Britain and Ireland

British Comparative Literature Association

Women in German Studies (UK and Ireland)

Modern Languages Association of America

German Studies Association of America

Research Overview

I am interested in all research relating to creative futures - how different forms of creative practice exist in society and how the techniques we can learn from the arts might help us make better worlds for the future. This is a licence to care deeply about the multiple contexts we inhabit, from those of our imagination through to the very real circumstances in which we live, think, and act. So far, I have developed this work in relation to concepts of world literature and world authorship, as well as exploring the actual practice of graphic fiction as a research method.

PhD Supervision Interests

I welcome proposals in all areas of 20th and 21st century German literature and culture, and am also interested in supervising comparative projects that deal with issues of authorship, celebrity, world literature and the global literary industry, the relationship between the media and the culture industry, and questions surrounding the transmission and reception of culture in the contemporary world.

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