Judie Cole
I studied languages incl German at Swansea, later joined the local DAAD (Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst = German Academic Exchange Service) in London and worked there for 37 yrs until I retired relatively recently. It is the German State funded NGO for worldwide academic mobility and exchange. I had a surprisingly large number of documents from my father’s family who lived in Berlin. Together with my cousin who came here (on Kindertransport) – he was from an older generation and died 5 yrs ago – we researched much of the family’s roots. Much of the material we sent to the Jewish Museum in Berlin where it is part of their archives and as such can be used by anyone who wishes to look at it or research the family. They were relatively well off until the crash in 1923 and Wall St. in 1929 we think. My father came here in 1933 aged 33 and my mother from Nuremberg, also in 1933 aged 16. I have read extensively on survivors etc though I assume all else involved in this venture have too. I am 74 yrs old and live in SW London.
Scott Denham
I hold the Dana Professorship of German Studies at Davidson College, in North Carolina. I studied at the University of Chicago, the Philipps-Universität Marburg, the Freie Universität Berlin and Harvard University, working there primarily in German studies, but also in comparative literature and history. My teaching and research interests include German literary and cultural studies broadly; modernism and narrative theory; the Holocaust and its representation; literary translation; second-language and writing pedagogy; Susan Sontag; Kafka, Mann, Lasker-Schüler, Günter Grass; Christa Wolf, Paul Celan; postwar German film; German politics and culture; and comparative questions of identity, loss and memory in the central European context.
Svenja Frank
Svenja Frank (SFHEA) studied European Culture, English and German Literature in Eichstätt, London (UCL) and Freiburg. From 2006-2010 she worked as a research assistant and taught English and German Literature at Freiburg and Riga; from 2010-2014 she was DAAD-Lektor at Oxford. For her phd-project on the contemporary German novel she moved to Göttingen with a Christoph-Lichtenberg-Fellowship (viva in October 2020). Publications include: 9/11 in European Literature. Negotiating Identities Against the Attacks and What Followed (Palgrave Macmillan 2017), „Melancholy in Wilhelm Genazino’s Novels and Its Construction as Other“ (Edinburgh German Yearbook 2012).
Patrick McConeghy
Dewitt, Michigan, USA (born 1947)
I am a retired professor of German, having taught at Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI, USA, from 1977-2013. My research began with Arthurian epics and courtly love poetry from the Middle Ages, moved to German literature and law during the Reformation, to cultural diversity and minority voices in 19th and 20th century Germany, and finally to the works of Daniel Kehlmann and Jenny Erpenbeck, contemporary German writers. Along the way I served as Associate Dean for Graduate Studies and Research and Acting Dean of the College of Arts and Letters with publications during that period on university-community relations. My interest in paleography and the transcription and translation of handwritten German documents began when our Library’s Special Collections needed assistance with a grant application to preserve 18 release agreements they possessed sworn by prisoners in the Margrave of Brandenburg’s jail in Kitzingen from 1520-1527. Since then, I have worked on projects including a land transfer manuscript from 1442 for UCLA, a soldier’s Franco-Prussian War diary, letters dealing with the founding of a utopian religious colony in 1860’s Michigan (Ora-Labora) for the Archives of Michigan, and the diaries and letters of a family fleeing the Red Army across East Prussia in 1945.
Eva Neuberger
I come from Münster in Germany. I studied English Studies and Teaching German as Foreign and Second Language in Bonn ( I have always been fascinated by languages!). I am 26 years old and I live in Leeds, UK. In 2018, I came to Leeds because I was awarded a scholarship to teach German at the University of Leeds for a year. I decided to stay in Leeds and I am now teaching in school.
Anna Nyburg
Anna Nyburg graduated in Modern Languages from the University of Toronto in 1972 after which she completed an MA at the University of East Anglia. She taught German, Italian and French in further education and higher education, notably Imperial College London where she is now an Honorary Lecturer. Following her PhD (University of London, 2009) in Exile Studies on the subject of refugee art publishers in Britain, she has published widely and also co-produced a film on refugee designers (2017). She is a committee member and editor of the Research Centre for German and Austrian Exile Studies, University of London.
J.B.M. Poulter
Jeremy Poulter. After a degree from St Catharine’s Cambridge in Modern and Mediaeval Languages, I trained as a teacher in Leeds and began working in a school there. I retired after more than forty years and now live in Yorkshire. I taught English as a second language in West Africa and in Germany, and I taught French and German in secondary schools in England and Scotland. I have worked evening classes and Summer schools, I have been an examiner for GCSE and A Levels. I have worked with every possible age group, and for many years I worked in international recruitment for schools. Recently I have travelled to the Southern states of the USA and twice to China, and I am busy writing my own travelogues. Recently, I have been teaching French online, and I continue to advise predominantly Chinese students on how to apply and prepare for places in UK independent schools, then universities. I have reached the age of 72, and my next ambition is to move abroad. I look forward to many more challenges yet.
Julian Preece
Professor German Studies, University of Swansea. I began learning French at primary school at the age of seven as the UK prepared to join the European Economic Community (now called the EU). I started German when I was 12 and developed my fascination with both languages through school exchanges with Hamburg and visits to France. In my teaching of German language, literature and cinema at Swansea I try to convey my enthusiasms for communication and for finding out about how people have lived and thought in Germany as well as neighbouring European countries through the tumultuous and often painful period of the twentieth century. I am a traditionalist in my approach, believing that there is no substitute for close reading and philological study, but also (I hope) innovative in my willingness to embrace new ideas and to explore unusual material. My areas of expertise include: Contemporary; Germany German and European Twentieth-Century Literature; the Canettis (Elias and Veza); Günter Grass; Kafka; life-writing (especially letters); German Cinema.
Alice Riegler
Alice Riegler completed her undergraduate studies at the University of Florence and her MA and PhD at University College London’s History Department. She currently holds a research fellowship in economic history at the University of Trento (Italy). Her main research focus is the Nachlaß of 19th century civil engineer Alois Negrelli, housed at the Technisches Museum in Vienna. As a native German speaker, she has worked on several transcription and translation projects of old German script and takes a particular interest in German Jewish history.
Karen Seago
Karen Seago is a native speaker of German but has lived in England longer than in Germany – her language of use is English. She is a retired academic in Translation Studies and Comparative Literature, teaching (most recently) popular literary translation. Her publications are on translations of fairy tales and on the reception / translation of Grimms’ Fairy Tales in England; on crime fiction in translation and fantasy in translation.
Ursula Troche
Ursula Troche, writer, artist, and double migrant on the Solway at West Cumbria. Works at poetry, prose, live art, film, psychogeography. Inspired by space and (translation) places, the in-between, inner lives and hidden stories. I grew up along the East-West Express that ran across the Iron Curtain from Moscow to London, at what was then West Germany. Studied Politics and African Studies at the University of London, and later Intercultural Therapy. In the late 1990s, I was part of the re-launched Manifold Magazine of New Poetry, edited by Vera Rich, translator of poetry from Ukrainian and Belarusian. Participation in various projects, including ‘Soul Immigrants’ and ‘Theatre for Mankind’. Performed poetry at the South London Human Rights festival, Portobello Visual Arts Festival, among many others. Participation at ‘Well London’. Short play: Sea Too. Since moving to the Solway on the Irish Sea coast, development of live art and sculpture. ‘Becoming Tree Festival, and others’. Currently also translating the peace- and protest song lyrics of Fasia Jansen, a black and queer German Holocaust survivor, who went on to become a folk singer and peace activist. My work is published in various online literary magazines and anthologies in English and German: please see here for details.
Margaret Vallence
Born 9 June 1941.
Parents journalists and authors. 1963 BA Hons in German, University College London. 1969 M.Litt, University of Cambridge. Thesis on the Interaction of politics and literature in the works of Gustav Landauer. Published article on Wolf Biermann in Survey, a Journal of Soviet and East European Studies, October 1966. Later wrote about Rudolf Rocker for the Journal of Contemporary History, July 1973. In 1968 worked briefly on Times Literary Supplement. 1972-1995 Lecturer in German Studies at Thames Valley University, London. 1996-2012 taught German at Imperial College, London. Also published a number of translations. Particular interest in the GDR and its writers. In recent years have written reports for New Books in German.
