Professor Andrew J. Webber
- Professor of Modern German and Comparative Culture
Contact
Location
- Faculty of Modern & Medieval Languages & Linguistics
About
Andrew Webber completed his PhD in Austrian Modernist writing at Cambridge in 1986. Following a first appointment as Lecturer in German at QMUL, he returned to Cambridge, as a College Teaching Officer and Fellow of Churchill College. He was appointed to a University Assistant Lectureship in 1994, a Readership in 2004, and a Professorship in 2010. In 2009-10, he was Acting Director of the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH). In 2014, he was Distinguished International Visitor at UNSW (Sydney). The public lecture he held there on contemporary German visual culture (drawn from his chapter for the Routledge Handbook of German Politics and Culture, ed. Sarah Colvin) can be viewed here. In autumn 2015 he held the Erich Auerbach Visiting Chair of Global Literary Studies at the University of Tübingen. In 2019 he was elected a Fellow of the British Academy.
Research
Research interests:
- Modern German and comparative literature
- German and comparative film and visual culture
- Cultural theory (especially psychoanalysis, gender and sexuality)
- Urban cultural studies
- Digital Humanities
Recent research projects:
A Cultural Topography of Berlin (Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship, 2004-7)
Digital Critical Edition of Middle-Period Works by Arthur Schnitzler (AHRC standard research grant, 2014-19), for further details, please see the Arthur Schnitzler digital website.
The Cinema of Christian Petzold
Space and Place in Contemporary German-language Culture (ongoing)
Published works:
Monographs
Screening Work: The Films of Christian Petzold, with Stephan Hilpert (Oxford: Legenda, 2024).
Berlin in the Twentieth Century: A Cultural Topography (Cambridge: CUP, 2008; paperback edition, 2011).
The European Avant-garde 1900-1940 (Cambridge: Polity, 2004).
The Doppelgänger: Double Visions in German Literature (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996).
Sexuality and the Sense of Self in the Works of Georg Trakl and Robert Musil (London: Bithell/MHRA, 1990).
Edited Volumes
Placing Schnitzler, Austrian Studies 27 (2019), ed. with Judith Beniston.
South and North: Contemporary Urban Orientations, ed. with Kerry Bystrom, Ashleigh Harris (London/New Delhi: Routledge, 2018)
Cambridge Companion to the Literature of Berlin (Cambridge: CUP, 2017)
Memory Culture and the Contemporary City: Building Sites, with Uta Staiger and Henriette Steiner (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).
Passage Work: Walter Benjamin between the Disciplines, special number of Paragraph, 32.3 (November 2009).
Cities in Transition: The Moving Image and the Modern Metropolis, with Emma Wilson (London: Wallflower, 2008).
Perfomance and Performativity in German Cultural Studies, with Carolin Duttlinger and Lucia Ruprecht (Berne: Lang, 2004).
Eight German Novellas, World’s Classics (Oxford: OUP, 1997).
For a List of Essay Publications, please click here.
Teaching and supervision
Teaching interests:
- Modern German Literature, Culture and Thought at all levels
- Modern German Cultures of Performance
- Comparative Culture (European Film; The Body: MPhil module on The Modern City)
Supervisor of:
Eloise Richardson
Alex Mentzel
Francesco Albé
Course contact for:
Ge6 Modern German Culture (2): 1890 to the present day