Alrik Daldrup

Supervisor: Prof Sarah Colvin

Research Topic: Staying with Bad Feelings. The Affective Politics of Complaint in Contemporary German Literature 

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. 

Conference papers:

The personal is structural. Negative Gefühle als Ausdruck des Politischen in der Gegenwartsliteratur, IVG, Section on: Transnational, Intersektionell, Dekolonial, Plural - Herausforderungen, Aufgaben und Chancen für eine Germanistik des 21. Jahrhunderts, Graz, July 2025.

Glistening, Shimmering, Moving. Vitalising Aesthetic Experiments in the German Literature of the 21st Century, DDGC: Interdependence and Solidarity Formations in German Studies and the Arts, Panel on: From Petrification to Dynamic Solidarity: Animapolitics as Theory and Practice, online, April 2025.

DAAD Doctoral Conference 2024 – Critical German and European Studies: ‘International Interventions and the State of The Field’, Cambridge, November 2024, co-organised with Katie Unwin and Miriam Schwarz.

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:

Killjoy Poetics in Antje Rávik Strubel’s Blaue Frau, in: German Life and Letters (accepted).

Archiving the Self as Activism in Laura Leupi’s Das Alphabet der sexualisierten Gewalt (2024), in: Activist Writing / Activist Reading, edited by Marta Cenedese and Leila Essa, Bloomsbury, forthcoming 2025).

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 Clara Busch) of the German Graduate Research Seminar

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), Dr Kirstin Gwyer (Oxford), Shoshana Schwebel (UBC Vancouver) and postgraduate students from MMLL.