Name

Alrik Daldrup

 

College

Jesus College               

Email 

aojrd2@cam.ac.uk           

Supervisor

Prof Sarah Colvin

Research Topic

Companion Texts. Affective Archives of Violence and Resistance in Contemporary German Literature

 

About Me       

Alrik holds a Master’s degree in German literature and political science at the Christian-Albrechts-University of Kiel. He spent one semester at the University of Gothenburg, studying German, English, and History of Ideas. During his studies at Kiel, he supervised tutorial classes and served as a research and teaching assistant for Prof Timo Felber (Department of German Studies) and Prof Paula Diehl (Department of Political Science). Additionally, he guest-taught a session of an advanced undergraduate seminar on queer theory and burlesque fiction with Dr Daniel Eder.

At Cambridge, Alrik’s work is closely intertwined with the German Section’s Research Group 'Cultural Production and Social Justice' and the international EU Horizon / UKRI research project, ‘The Cartography of the Political Novel in Europe’, which investigates how the political novel contributes to understandings of local and global politics, and how it may be used as a means of political experience, protest, and participation. 

 

Research

Alrik’s research centres on vigilant archives of traumatic violence. Drawing on queer feminist affect theory (Ahmed, Berlant, Cvetkovich) and Black trauma studies (Hartman, Sharpe), the project is concerned with works of fiction that register the true impact and affective weight of unfinished histories of escalating injustice. In face of the exclusions of dominant archives, ‘companion texts’ (Ahmed) create attuned communities out of bad feelings, document acts of resistance, and require the recipient to stay anxious, watchful and careful. As such, companion texts can be part of a killjoy survival kit that may help to affectively work through relations of power. Among the writers Alrik is interested in are Antje Rávik Strubel, Sharon Dodua Otoo, Judith Hermann, Yael Inokai, Laura Leupi and Mithu Sanyal. The theoretical approach of his project is deeply grounded in a political notion of literature as a radical democratic venue of ‘epistemic interaction’ (Medina).

Alrik’s broader interests include the literature of the 21st century, literature and politics, social justice and cultural production, feminist affect studies, trauma studies, and ecocriticism.

 

Scholarships/Prizes 

Cambridge Schröder Scholarship in German Studies 2023-2026

The German Quarterly Graduate Student Paper Award 2023

Prize for Gender-Sensitive Research of Kiel University (Faculty of Arts and Humanities) 2023

Erasmus Plus Scholarship 2022/23

 

Fellowships

 

Teaching

Lent 2025: Supervisor for GE9 (‘Power, “race,” and gender in early modern literary texts’) and GE13

 

Teaching interests:

• German literature and film
• Close reading
• University-level writing
• Political theory

 

 

Conference papers

Seminar on: Politisch schreiben in der deutschsprachigen Gegenwartsliteratur: Methodische und theoretische Annäherungen, GSA, Atlanta, September 2024, co-convening with Jeannette Oholi and Laura Marie Sturtz.

Door Stories. An Attuned Vocabulary for Violence in Laura Leupi’s Das Alphabet der sexualisierten Gewalt (2024), AGS, Panel on: Representing, Responding, Resisting – Cultural Engagements with Violence in Post-1945 Germany, Leeds, September 2024.

She names it, she nails it. Echoes of Killjoy Activism in Antje Rávik Strubel’s Blaue Frau, ACLA, Panel on: Activist Writing / Activist Reading, Montreal, March 2024.

When Legal Justice Fails: Fantasies of Equality and Antje Rávik Strubel‘s Blaue Frau, Literature and the Rule of Law / Literatur und Rechtsstaat: Aesthetic Negotiations, University of Cambridge, January 2024.

Grimmelshausens Courasche intersektional. Neue Lektüren (international workshop), University of Zurich, July 2023.

Biopolitical Realism, Thinking with Lauren Berlant - Graduate Student Virtual Seminar, online, May 2023.

Truly a ‘Reflection of Our Times’? All Quiet on the Western Front and the War in Ukraine, Watching War: A Symposium on Edward Berger’s All Quiet on the Western Front, University of Warwick/UBC Vancouver, online, May 2023.

All about love. Räume des Möglichen in Sharon Dodua Otoos Adas Raum, Kultur-Sprache-Raum. Internationales Online-Symposium für Germanistik-Studierende am Beijing Institute of Technology (BIT), online, December 2022.

Disruption, Dissensus, Temporality. The Aesthetics of Radical Democracy, Workshop on Simultaneity. Aesthetics, Ethics, and Social Justice, University of Cambridge (Dr Stephanie Galasso), guest: Dr Jessica Ruffin, November 2022.

Radikaldemokratische Möglichkeiten in Sharon Dodua Otoos Adas Raum, International Colloquium: The Literary and Essayistic Writing of Sharon Dodua Otoo, University of Cambridge, with the author in attendance, March 2022.

Book review: In the Ruins of Neoliberalism (Wendy Brown, 2020), Colloquium Political Theory, History of Ideas, and Political Culture, University of Kiel, online, January 2022.

Disrupting Violent Distributions of the Sensible. Modes of Dissensus in Sharon Dodua Otoo’s Adas Raum, Sichtbarkeit:en conference, University of Oxford, online, July 2021.

For those who have been in crisis. Das Politische in der Literatur Sharon Dodua Otoos, Digitale INternationale Germanistische Studierendentagung (DINGS) 2021, online, with the author in attendance, April 2021.

 

Publications

On Antje Rávik Strubel’s Blaue Frau: https://www.caponeu.eu/cdp/novels/blaue-frau (text portrait for the CAPONEU project).

Reorienting Knowledge of Structural Systems of Violence in Sharon Dodua Otoo’s Adas Raum and Antje Rávik Strubel’s Blaue Frau, in: Rewriting Identities in Contemporary Germany. Radical Diversity and Literary Interventions, edited by Selma Rezgui, Laura Marie Sturtz, and Tara Talwar Windsor, Boydell & Brewer, 2024: 187-208.

Queerness, Affekte und Eigensinn in Grimmelshausens Courasche, in: The German Quarterly 97 (2) 2024: 130-149 (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/gequ.12420).

Von der ‘Macht, Welt zu machen’: Radikale Demokratie in Sharon Dodua Otoos Adas Raum, in: German Life and Letters 77 (1), 2024: 125-145, Special Issue: Sharon Dodua Otoo – Literature, Politics, Possibility, edited by Sarah Colvin and Tara Talwar Windsor (https://doi.org/10.1111/glal.12400).

 

Other activities and roles

Moderation of readings, for example with Sharon Dodua Otoo and Cécil Joyce Röski

Co-founder (together with Jeannette Oholi), Network and Colloquium for Critical German Studies in Germany

Co-editor, Augenblick: A Journal for Undergraduate German Studies, UBC Vancouver

Co-organizer (together with Dr Melina Mandelbaum), Seminar Series on ‘Cultural Production and Social Justice’

The aim of this series is to bring academics of different career levels together who all share an interest in the role of aesthetics and artistic creation in relation to emancipatory politics. Previous speakers included Prof Mark Devenney (Brighton), Dr Anna Richards (Birkbeck, London), and postgraduate students from MMLL.