College

Jesus College                   

Email

pk517@cam.ac.uk   

Supervisor

Dr Charlotte Woodford

Research Topic

Somatic Semantics. Forms of Sexual Trauma.

About

Phyllis holds a BA in Comparative Literature from UCL, and an MPhil in English Studies (Criticism and Culture) from the University of Cambridge. She spent two semesters at Sorbonne Université, studying French and Philosophy. From 2024 to 2025, she was a visiting scholar at the Schlegel Graduate School for Literary Studies, Freie Universität Berlin.

Teaching Interests

Supervisions and lectures for the modules “Sexuality and the Unconscious” and “Disruptive Narratives.”

Research

Phyllis works on the interactions of bodies and texts with an emphasis of European literature of the 19th and 20th centuries, especially in German, but also in English and French. Related areas of interest are visual and performance arts, critical theory and gender and sexuality studies. She researches art that situates itself at the limits of signifying language: gaps, blanks and absences, abstraction, experimentation and formalism and the physical intensities of “body genres”. 

Her PhD thesis turns towards the language of sexual(ised) violence in 20th century literature and thought. It sets critically neglected modernist women’s writing, including the prose fiction of Bertha Pappenheim, made famous by her inclusion as Anna O., into Sigmund Freud’s and Josef Breuer’s Studies on Hysteria and the poetry of the surrealist artist Unica Zürn in the context of debates about the linguistic qualities of “trauma” including the work of Cathy Caruth, Ruth Leys, Lauren Berlant, and Catherine Malabou. Does trauma denote the specific qualities of an event or is it a historically situated narrative form? Are there alternative ways of narrating violent re- or de-organisations of experience? 

Scholarships/Prizes

• Scholarship of the German Academic Scholarship Foundation, 2017-2021
• Schröder Scholarship, 2021-2024

Teaching

Lectures:

• “Body Concepts”, MA Critical Dance Studies, FU Berlin, 2025        
• GE12 “Disruptive Narratives” (Kafka)

Seminars and supervisions:

• GE13 “Writing the Subject” (Günter Grass, Christa Wolf, Emine Sevgi Özdamar, Herta Müller)
• GE9 “Power, Race, and Gender in Early Modern Literature” (Andreas Gryphius, Daniel Casper von Lohenstein)
• GE C1 “Translation into German”
• GE13 “History and Poetry” (Adorno, Celan, Bachmann)
• GE A3 “Modern Literature” (Kafka)
• GE5 “Sexuality and the Unconscious” (Freud, Schnitzler, Wedekind)

Conference papers

• “Stone Femme Blues”, ‘Body, Language’ seminar, American Comparative Literature Association annual meeting, 2025
• “No Nature. Computations of Sex in Kafka’s Short Fiction”, Kafka Transformed International Conference, University of Oxford, 2024
• “A Tale of Two Teile. Freud’s Bruchstück and Kafka’s Urteil”, Mit Kafka/Nach Kafka workshop, Free University Berlin, 2024
• “The Nullified Heroine. Beyond the Limits of Verbalisation with Kleist, Freud, and Pappenheim”, International Society for the Study of Narrative annual conference, University of Newcastle, 2024
• “Anna and Omega. Disappearing Women in Hegel, Kleist, and Freud”, ‘Literature and the Rule of Law – Aesthetic Negotiations’ conference, University of Cambridge, 2024
• “Critical Gnosis. Hans Jonas and the Others of Theory”, DAAD-University of Cambridge Research Hub for German Studies Postgraduate workshop, 2023
• “Venus Defaced. Writing Pain with Leopold von Sacher-Masoch and Unica Zürn”, Triangular Colloquium Cambridge – Berlin – Chicago, University of Chicago, 2023
• “Other Mother. Thüring von Ringoltingen’s Melusine and Monstrous Women”, Graduate Workshop: New Directions in Medieval German Studies, Greifswald University, 2022
• “Satan Herself. Mary Daly’s Gyn/ecology and the Malleus Maleficarum”, European Association for the Study of Religion Conference, University College Cork, 2022
• “Unica Zürn’s Hextentexte: Anagrams and the Hermeneutics of the Body”, German Graduate Research Seminar, University of Cambridge, 2021

Publications

Book Chapters:

“Against Inarticulation: Sexualised Violence and the Limits of the Verbal in Unica Zürn’s Dark Spring”, forthcoming in Literary Acts of Agency, eds. Ivana Perica, Catriona Corke, Philipp Wegemann (Berlin: De Gruyter, forthcoming 2025)

Journal Articles:

“Reading the ‘So-Called’. The Beautiful Soul, Hysteria, and Affect”, Publications of the English Goethe Society, 2025

Review Articles:

Review of Judith Butler, Who’s afraid of Gender, Ian Fleishman, Flamboyant Fictions: The Failed Art of Passing, and Ina Linge, Queer Livability: German Sexual Sciences and Life Writing, forthcoming in Paragraph: A Journal Of Modern Critical Theory, 2025

Translations:

Leo Spitzer, “Zur Entstehung der sogenannten 'erlebten Rede,'" Germanisch-Romanische Monatsschrift 16 (1928), forthcoming in Narrative, 2026

Other:

A Woman is Everyone, Poetry, New Feathers 5.3, 2024

Other activities and roles

Organising the German Graduate Research Seminar, 2022-2024