Dr Marie-Louise James
- Assistant Professor in Modern German Studies
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About
Marie-Louise James is University Assistant Professor in Modern German Studies. Her research and teaching areas include modernist German literature, intellectual history, film, and media theory, as well as memory studies and medical humanities; she works multilingually between German-, Italian-, and French-language materials. Prior to joining MMLL and the German section at Cambridge, Dr James completed her PhD in German at Princeton University, where she held additional research affiliations with the Program in European Cultural Studies, Program in Italian Studies, and Center for Digital Humanities. She holds a BA (Modern Languages, German and Italian) and an MPhil (European, Latin American and Comparative Literatures and Cultures) from the University of Cambridge. At Princeton, she was awarded an Honorific Fellowship from the Princeton University Graduate School in recognition of her research, as well as a Teaching Award and an Exemplary Mentor Award from the McGraw Center for Teaching and Learning. In the 2024-2025 academic year, she was a visiting guest researcher at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. Her research has been supported by several awards and fellowships, including the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), Nietzsche-Forum München Werner-Ross-Stipendium, and New German Critique Hugdahl Memorial Award.
Research
As a literary historian and cultural theorist, Dr James traces the entanglements of aesthetics, politics, and pathologized affects across disciplines and national borders. Recursive temporalities and intermedial frameworks recur throughout her work. More broadly, Dr James is interested in the ‘befores’ and ‘afters’ of paradigms like modernism and modernity, and her research examines how certain concepts persist and move across times and spaces, particularly in exchanges between artistic representations, political literature, and medicine. Her current book project, which is based on her doctoral thesis The Persistence of Nostalgia: Modernism’s Pathology?, uncovers the history of the term ‘nostalgia’ at the intersection of psychology, art, and politics in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Published works:
Edited volumes
Uncanny Environments, edited by Konstantin D. Haensch, Marie-Louise James, Matthias Planitzer, Uncanny Issues, vol. III (Hamburg: Textem, 2026) [forthcoming]
Refereed journal articles
“Screening the Venetian Uncanny: Luchino Visconti’s Death in Venice (1971) and Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now (1973),” Journal of Italian Cinema & Media Studies, 13.4 (2025), pp. 365–382
“‘Nostalgia for the Sacred’: Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Theorem,” Journal of Italian Cinema & Media Studies, 12.4 (2024), pp. 541–557
“The Erotic Gaze of the Italienreise: Wilhelm von Gloeden and Der Tod in Venedig,” Publications of the English Goethe Society, 90.3 (2021), pp. 229–252
Editor-Selected Articles
“Sehen Sie mal, Warburg…’ Zur Skalierung politischer Pathossemantik,” Zeitschrift für Ideengeschichte 17.1 (2023), pp. 54–60
Chapters in edited volumes
“‘Unheimlichkeit des Ortes,’ Uncanniness of Place: A Conversation with Alexander Kluge,” edited and translated by Marie-Louise James, in Uncanny Environments (Hamburg: Textem, 2026) [forthcoming]
“The Subjunctive of Images: Alexander Kluge’s Visual Poetics of AI,” co-authored with Jeremy Hamers, in Ethics and Aesthetics of Artificial Images (Naples: Orthotes) [forthcoming]
Teaching and supervision
Dr James’s teaching ranges from German modernist literature and culture to film and psychoanalysis; she also teaches and works with frameworks in media theory, cultural studies, and historiography. Dr James currently lectures and supervises for scheduled papers GE1/GEA3 (Kafka), GE2 (Freud), GE6 (Freudian Psychoanalysis and Fin de Siècle Culture; Weimar Culture in Film and Text), GE12 (Modernist (Post-)colonialisms; Modernity’s Shadow: Nostalgia and Modernism), and GE13 (Performing Berlin in Film: Between Possession and Dispossession).
Course contact for:
Easter Term - GE1: Introduction to German Studies
Easter Term - GE6: Modern German Culture (2): 1890 - the Present Day