Dr Steffan G Davies

My research interests lie in the German literature and history of the late eighteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries, and in the interplay of literature, historiography and history. My doctoral thesis traced the influence of Schiller’s History of the Thirty Years War and drama Wallen­stein on subsequent historiographical as well as literary interpretations of Wallenstein, analysing the figure’s role in the construction of German national and ethnic identity in the nineteenth century.

As well as publishing on other texts by Schiller and Goethe, I have worked in detail on the novelist Alfred Döblin (1878-1957), uncovering Döblin’s response to the traumas of war and exile in his novel Hamlet oder Die lange Nacht nimmt ein Ende (1946/1956, translated into English as Tales of a Long Night, 1984). This has led me to a new field, crossing a broad timespan once again: the poetics of exile in German literature since around 1800. This project was enabled by a two-year Leverhulme Trust Major Research Fellowship from September 2017 to August 2019. In 2013 I was awarded an Arts Faculty "Rising Star" award for my research. I am an editor of German Life and Letters and was a co-editor of Angermion from 2010 to 2016.

I warmly welcome proposals for postgraduate work in these fields, and would also welcome contact in Welsh and on links between Wales and the German-speaking world.