Dr Doriane Zerka
- Assistant Professor in Medieval German Literature
Contact
Location
- Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages and Linguistics Raised Faculty Building University of Cambridge Sidgwick Avenue Cambridge CB3 9DA United Kingdom
About
Doriane Zerka completed her first degree in German and Hispanic Studies (European Studies) at Queen Mary, University of London and her MPhil in European Literature and Culture at the University of Cambridge. She received her PhD in German and Hispanic Studies from King’s College London for a thesis on representations of Iberia and the construction of identities in medieval German literature. After completing her doctoral studies in 2019, she worked as Lecturer in German for Queen Mary, University of London, where she taught a variety of courses on German literature up to the 21st century, the history of the German language and medieval literature. Between 2020-2023, she held a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship at the University of Cambridge, considering the role and representation of women as transcultural agents involved in the making of premodern European literature. Her first monograph, Imagining Iberia in Medieval German Literature, was published with Legenda in the Transcript series in 2023.
Research
Research interests:
Doriane Zerka works broadly on medieval literature from the German-speaking and Iberian worlds from a comparative, transcultural and transtemporal approach, putting into dialogue modern theory with premodern Europe. Particular interests include postcolonial theory, Orientalism and representations of the medieval Iberian past, network theory in relation to the mobility and connectivity of literature in medieval Europe, approaches to gender in medieval texts and the representation of medieval women in modern scholarship.
Recent research projects:
- Imagining Iberia in Medieval German Literature (Doctoral project, 2015-2019)
- Women as Transcultural Agents in Premodern European Literature (Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship, 2020-2023)
Published works:
- Zerka, Doriane. “Westlicher Orient? Iberien in der deutschen Literatur des Mittelalters.” In Der Orient in mittelalterlicher Literatur. Bd. 1. Projektion, Konstruktion, Inszenierung. Zeitschrift für deutsches Altertum und deutsche Literature 47.1, edited by Mathias Herweg, 83–102. Stuttgart: S. Hirzel Verlag, 2025.
- Zerka, Doriane. Imagining Iberia in Medieval German Literature. Transcript 26. Cambridge: Legenda, 2023. https://www.mhra.org.uk/publications/Imagining-Iberia-in-Medieval-German-Literature.
- Zerka, Doriane. "Mapping Mobility: Women and Textual Networks in the Fifteenth-Century Prose Epic Herzog Herpin." Interfaces: A Journal of Medieval European Literatures 9 (December 2022): 95–123. https://doi.org/10.54103/interfaces-09-06.
- Zerka, Doriane. "Andalusi Space and the European Network in the German Rolandslied." In Al-Andalus in Motion: Travelling Concepts and Cross-Cultural Contexts, edited by Rachel Scott, AbdoolKarim Vakil and Julian Weiss, 157–178. London: Centre for Late Antique & Medieval Studies, King's College London, 2021.
- Zerka, Doriane. "Constructing Poetic Identity: Iberia as a Heterotopia in Oswald von Wolkenstein’s Songs." Modern Language Review 114, No. 2 (April 2019): 274–293. https://doi.org/10.5699/modelangrevi.114.2.0274.
Teaching and supervision
Teaching interests:
- Medieval German Literature
- Medieval Iberian Literature
- Comparative Literature
- Critical Theory & the Middle Ages
Course contact for:
GE4: The Making of German Culture
GE9: German Literature, Thought and History in the Medieval and Early Modern Periods