Prof. Dr. Christian Schmitt-Kilb

Professor für den Lehrstuhl Britische Literatur / Anglistische Literaturwissenschaft

Room 8011

August-Bebel-Straße 28

christian.schmitt-kilb(at)uni-rostock.de

Tel.: +49 (0)381 498-2585

Fax: +49 (0)381 498-2594

Curriculum Vitae

Curriculum Vitae

Christian Schmitt-Kilb read English Studies, American Studies and History at the Universities of Frankfurt a. Main, Oxford Brookes (UK) and Keele (UK). He holds an M.A. in "Twentieth Century British Fiction" from the University of Keele (1993), an "Erstes Staatsexamen" (English and History, 1996) and a PhD (2002) from Johann Wolfgang Goethe Universität, Frankfurt a. Main and he went through the process of "Habilitation" at Rostock University (2009). He has taught British Literature and Culture at the Universities of Frankfurt a. Main (1996-2000; 2008-2009) and Rostock (2000-2008). He has held the professorship for English Literature (Englische Literatur/Anglistische Literaturwissenschaft) since 2010.

Current projects

Current projects

Together with Prof. Kylie Crane (Rostock) and Dr. Solvejg Nitzke (Dresden):

Organisation of a panel with the working title "Silt and Mud" for the biennial conference of the EASLCE – European Association for the Study of Literature, Culture, and the Environment, "Sea More Blue: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Blue Ecopoetics", Perpignan (France), June 2024.

 

Early stages of planning "something" concerning the work of John Berger – conference, workshop, publication

Research Interests

Research Interests

  • Literature and the Environment
  • Ecocriticism and Environmental Humanities
  • Ecopoetics and Ecopoetry
  • Literary Genre and Climate Crisis
  • (New) Nature Writing
  • John Berger
Functions

Functions

Memberships and Offices

Memberships and Offices

  • Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment, UK and Ireland (ASLE-UKI)
  • German Association for the Study of British Cultures/Deutsche Gesellschaft für das Studium Britischer Kulturen 
  • Deutscher Anglistenverband
  • Deutscher Hochschulverband
Publications

Publications

Books

Abwesende Väter und Vatersuche im postmodernen Roman (Band 46 der Reihe "Horizonte: Studien zu Texten und Ideen der europäischen Moderne"), Trier (Wissenschaftlicher Verlag) 2016.

"Never was the Albion Nation without Poetrie": Poetik, Rhetorik und Nation im England der Frühen Neuzeit, Frankfurt am Main (Vittorio Klostermann) 2004. 

 

Edited Journals and Books

With Heike Hartung and Roberta Maierhofer, Masculinities Ageing Between Cultures: Relationality, Kinship and Care in Dialogue, Bielefeld (transcript) 2024.

With Sebastian Berg and Hanne Bolze (eds.), Hard Times: The Ecological Crisis in Britain, Vol. 106 (2023).

With Georgia Christinidis (eds.), Hard Times: Conservatism and Neoliberalism, Vol. 98, No. 2 (2015).

With Sebastian Berg (eds.), "Ecologies: Nature, Culture, and Politics in Contemporary Britain", Journal for the Study of British Cultures, Vol. 22, No. 1 (2015).

With Beate Rudlof (eds.), Journal for the Study of British Cultures: Sports, Vol. 18, No.1 (2011).

With H. G. Klaus (eds.), "Britain at War", Journal for the Study of British Cultures, Vol. 14, No. 2 (2007). 

 

Articles (selection)

"Heterogeneous Texts, Hybrid Genres, and Anthropocene Poetics: Juliana Spahr's 'Unnamed Dragonfly Species' (2011) and Sarah Moss's Summerwater (2020)", in: Short Fiction in Theory & Practice. (Special Issue: The Short Story and Ecology). 2024 (forthcoming).

"Prose for a More-Than-Human World: John Berger, Kathleen Jamie and the Ends of Genre". in: Ingrid Hotz-Davies, Martin Middeke, Christoph Reinfandt (eds.), Literary Materialisations: Making Matter Matter on Page, Stage and Screen, New York: Routledge. 2024 (forthcoming).

"'Nature’s way of representing the world': Alice Oswald's Poetry and Poetics of Water", in: Julia Fiedorczuk et. al. (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Ecopoetics, New York: Routledge. 2024.

"A Case for a Green Brexit? Paul Kingsnorth, John Berger and the pros and cons of a sense of place", in: Ina Habermann (ed.), The Road to Brexit. A Cultural Perspective on British Attitudes to Europe, Manchester: Manchester University Press. 2020.

"From a Dog's Eye View? Negotiating Anthropomorphism and Anamorphosis in Eva Hornung's Dog Boy (2009) and John Berger's King: A Street Story (1999), in: Roman Bartosch, Julia Hoydis (eds.), Teaching the Posthuman, Anglistik und Englischunterricht, Bd. 89. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter. 2019.

"'Poetry's a Line of Defence'. Ecopoetry and Politics in the 21st Century", in: Sabine Lenore Müller, Tina-Karen Pusse (eds.), From Ego to Eco: Mapping Shifts from Anthropocentrism to Ecocentrism, Leiden, Boston: Brill/Rodopi. 2018.

"Die Geburt des Subjekts als erschöpftes Selbst. Genre, Generation und Geschichte in Hamlet", in: Zeitsprünge: Forschungen zur Frühen Neuzeit, Band 22, Heft 3/4. 2018.

"Envisioning Cultural Imperialism and the Invention of English Literature in Elizabethan England", in: Barbara Schaff et al. (eds.), The Institution of English Literature, Göttingen (V&R). 2017.

"Landscape, Wilderness and the Wild in New Landscape Writing by Robert Macfarlane and Paul Farley/Michael Symmons Roberts", in: Susanne Friede et al. (eds.), Literaturwissenschaftliches Jahrbuch, Berlin (Duncker & Humblodt) 2016.

"'Untranslated Landscape': Recent Poetic Prose of Kathleen Jamie and Paul Farley/Michael Symmons Roberts", in: Ina Habermann, Daniela Keller (eds.), English Topographies in Literature and Culture: Space, Place, and Identity, Leiden (Brill Rodopi) 2016.

"Obituary: John Berger", in: Hard Times, Vol. 100, No. 2 (2016).

"Conservative New Labour, the Financial Crisis and Contemporary Fiction: John Lanchester's Capital (2012) and Sebastian Faulks’s A Week in December (2009)", in: Christian Schmitt-Kilb, Georgia Christinidis (eds.), Hard Times: Conservatism and Neoliberalism, Vol. 98, No. 2 (2015).

With Georgia Christinidis, "Narrative, Identity Formation, and the Bildungsroman: Introduction", in: Rainer Emig, Jana Gohrisch (eds.), Anglistentag 2014 Hannover: Proceedings, Trier (Wissenschaftlicher Verlag) 2015.

"Re-Reading the Re-Written Portrait of the Young Artist. Bernardine Evaristo’s Laras", in: Anette Pankratz, Barbara Puschmann-Nalenz (eds.), Portraits of the Artist as a Young Thing in British, Irish and Canadian Fiction after 1945, Heidelberg (Winter) 2012.

"'A Huge Lacuna vis-à-vis the Peasants': Red and Green in John Berger’s Trilogy Into Their Labours", in: H. G. Klaus, J. Rignall (eds.), Ecology and the Literature of the British Left. The Red and the Green, London (Ashgate) 2012.    

"The Forms and Meanings of Silence in Graham Swift’s Novels Shuttlecock (1981) and Waterland (1983): Madness, Strategy, Gender, Metafiction", in: Jörg Helbig, René Schallegger (eds.), Anglistentag 2009 Klagenfurt: Proceedings, Trier (Wissenschaftlicher Verlag) 2010.

"'Gypsies' and their Representation: Louise Doughty’s Stone Cradle and David Mitchell’s Black Swan Green", in: Barbara Korte, Eva Ulrike Pirker, Sissy Helff (eds.), Facing the East in the West: Images of Eastern Europe in British Literature, Film and Culture, Amsterdam / New York (Rodopi) 2010.    

"Poetik und Nation in Samuel Daniels Defence of Ryme (1603) und Edmund Spensers Shepheardes Calender (1579)", in: Kirsten Mahlke, Frank Bezner (eds.), Zwischen Wissen und Politik: Archäologie und Genealogie frühneuzeitlicher Vergangenheitskonstruktionen, Heidelberg (Universitätsverlag) 2010.

"Literarische Vatersuche im Zeichen der Postmoderne: Paul Auster, Patrick Modiano, Graham Swift", in: Dieter Thomä (ed.), Vaterlosigkeit: Geschichte und Gegenwart einer fixen Idee , Frankfurt/M. (Suhrkamp) 2010. 

"Abwesende Väter und das Problem der Autorschaft in Fiktion und Autobiographie: Das Beispiel Martin Amis", in: Malte-Christian Gruber, Sascha Ziemann (eds.), Die Unsicherheit der Väter: Zur Herausbildung paternaler Bindungen (Beiträge zur Rechts-, Gesellschafts- und Kulturkritik Band 9), Berlin (trafo) 2009.

"Männlichkeit in der Krise? Vaterschaft, abwesende Väter und Vaterlosigkeit in den Romanen von Graham Swift", in: Hella Ehlers et al. (eds.), Geschlechterdifferenz – und kein Ende? (Geschlechterforschung: sozial- und geisteswissenschaftliche Perspektiven Band 8), Berlin et al. (LIT Verlag) 2009. 

"The End(s) of Language in Brian Fiel’s Translations and Enda Walsh’s Disco Pigs and misterman", in: Scenario: Journal for Drama and Theatre in Foreign and Second Language Education Vol. 2 (2009), online journal: www.ucc.ie/en/scenario.

"Longing for Origins in Postmodern Times: Absent Parents in Kazuo Ishiguro's When We Were Orphans (2000) and Never Let Me Go (2005)", in: Anglistentag 2006 Halle: Proceedings, Trier (Wissenschaftlicher Verlag) 2007. 

"The Suez War and the Shaping of a Postimperial English Identity (with a Comment on Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day", in: Gabriele Linke, Holger Rossow (eds.), Rhetoric and Representation: The British at War (anglistik & englischunterricht Vol. 70), Heidelberg (Winter) 2007. 

"Lifestyle Anarchism and its Discontents: Mark Ravenhill, Enda Walsh and the Politics of Contemporary Drama", in: H. G. Klaus, Stephen Knight (eds.), "To Hell with Culture": Anarchism and Twentieth-Century British Literature, Cardiff (University of Wales Press) 2005. 

"Class[ics] Society. Class and Language in Tony Harrison's The School of Eloquence and 'v.'", in: Journal for the Study of British Cultures Vol. 11, No. 1 (2004). 

"Von Leeds nach Tokyo – Neues aus der britischen Gegenwartsliteratur", in: Risse: Zeitschrift für Literatur in Mecklenburg und Vorpommern Vol. 7, No. 14 (Herbst 2004).

"Ulrich Bielefeld and Gisela Engel, eds. Bilder der Nation: Kulturelle und politische Konstruktionen des Nationalen am Beginn der europäischen Moderne", in: Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik: A Quarterly of Language, Literature and Culture, Band 48, Heft 2 (2000).

"Claire McEachern. The Poetics of English Nationhood, 1590-1612", in: Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik: A Quarterly of Language, Literature and Culture, Band 46, Heft 4 (1998).

"Robert Weimann. Authority and Representation in Early Modern Discourse", in: Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik: A Quarterly of Language, Literature and Culture, Band 45, Heft 3 (1998).

"Vorgestellte Gemeinschaften und konstruierte Nationen: Kulturwissenschaftliche Beiträge zur Beschreibung der Nation", in: Zeitsprünge. Forschungen zur Frühen Neuzeit, Band 1, Heft 2 (1997). 

"Writing the Nation in Early Modern England: The Case of Rhetoric and Poetics", in: GRAMMA. Journal of Theory and Criticism (Special Issue: Text/History/Context), Volume 5 (Thessaloniki 1997).

Words I Like to Think About

Words I Like to Think About

Literature is the question minus the answer.

(Roland Barthes)

 

I can't tell you what art does and how it does it, but I know that often art has judged the judges, pleaded revenge to the innocent and shown to the future what the past suffered, so that it has never been forgotten. Art, when it functions like this, becomes a meeting-place of the invisible, the irreducible, the enduring, guts, and honor.

(John Berger)

 

That we find a crystal or a poppy beautiful means that we are less alone, that we are more deeply inserted into existence than the course of a single life would lead us to believe.

(John Berger)

 

We never look at just one thing; we are always looking at the relation between things and ourselves.

(John Berger)

 

If you Yumans wud take one bit of advise from a meer Fox? By now I know that you Yumans like your Storys to end hapy?

If you want your Storys to end happy, try being niser.

I awate your answer.

Fox8

(George Saunders)