Department of German and Dutch

Department of German and Dutch

GERMAN COURSE INFORMATION For full information about DUTCH courses and staff please CLICK HERE

   

Teaching and graduate supervision: David Midgley has many years' experience in teaching topics in German history and thought, as well as literature, from 1750 to the present day. The volume of essays on modernist fiction he edited in 1993, to which several members of the Cambridge German Department contributed, is still a widely used teaching resource. In the Faculty's MPhil in European Literature and Culture he currently lectures on Benjamin and Adorno, and gives seminars on Nietzsche and Freud, and Approaches to Historical Interpretation. His recent PhD students have worked on topics that include recent Holocaust literature, picaresque fiction in the 20th-century, modern dance culture and its reflections in literature, the significance of information technology for contemporary fiction, and writing in German by authors with immigrant backgrounds.

Research: David Midgley has written extensively on German literature and thought of the period since 1890, with a particular focus on literary modernism (Wedekind, Brecht, Horváth, Musil, and Döblin). He has contributed especially to the interpretation of the writings of Arnold Zweig, and his most recent book is a comprehensive study of the literature of the Weimar Republic entitled Writing Weimar (OUP, 2000). With Christian Emden he co-edits the series Cultural History and Literary Imagination. He is currently working on cultural developments in the decades before the First World War, with a particular focus on the relation between biological thought and the broader literary and intellectual culture.