Professor Sarah Colvin

Sarah Colvin studied German language and literature at the Universities of Oxford and Hamburg. She was a Junior Research Fellow at St John’s College, Oxford, a Lecturer and Reader at the University of Edinburgh, a Humboldt Fellow at Potsdam University, and held chairs at the universities of Edinburgh, Birmingham, and Warwick before becoming Schröder Professor of German at Cambridge in 2014. Sarah leads the research group Cultural Production and Social Justice with Dr Charlotte Woodford and Dr Tara Talwar Windsor, and is the Cambridge PI for the EU- and UKRI-funded project Cartography of the Political Novel in Europe (www.caponeu.eu).

Her primary research and teaching interests are in the areas of literature and epistemic injustice; cultural production and social justice; the political novel; literature and authoritarianism; narrative theory and narrative ethics; prisoner writing and arts in prisons.

She welcomes inquiries from potential MPhil and PhD students.

Published works: 

Books:

Literature and Epistemic Injustice. Power and Resistance in the Contemporary Novel. London and New York: Routledge 2025 (open access)

Shadowland: The Story of Germany Told by its Prisoners. London: Reaktion Books 2022 (Podcasts:https://www.historyextra.com/period/20th-century/germanys-postwar-prisons-podcast-sarah-colvin/ and https://newbooksnetwork.com/shadowland)

Ulrike Meinhof and West German Terrorism: Language, Violence and Identity. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2009 (Podcast: https://www.baader-meinhof.com/podcast-2-sarah-colvin-interview/)

Women and German Drama: Playwrights and their Texts. Rochester, NY: Camden House 2003

The Rhetorical Feminine: Gender and Orient on the German Stage. Oxford: Clarenden 1999  

Recent articles:

‘Mothers and Others in Fiction by Sharon Dodua Otoo and Olivia Wenzel’. German Life and Letters 77 (2024) special issue: Sharon Dodua Otoo: Literature, Politics, Possibility, 68-85

‘Narrative Pilgrimage and Chiastic Justice in Olivia Wenzel’s 1000 Serpentinen Angst and Sharon Dodua Otoo’s Adas Raum’, in Sarah Colvin and Stephanie Galasso (eds), Epistemic Injustice and Creative Agency. Global Perspectives on Literature and Film. New York: Routledge 2023, 176-97

‘Doing drag in blackface: hermeneutical challenges and infelicitous subjectivity in Courasche, or is Grimmelshausen still worth reading?’ Daphnis 50 (2022), 666-92

‘May Ayim and Subversive Laughter: The Aesthetics of Epistemic Change’. German Studies Review 45/1 (2022), 81-103

‘Freedom time: Temporal Insurrections in Olivia Wenzel’s 1000 Serpentinen Angst and Sharon Dodua Otoo’s Adas Raum’. German Life and Letters 75 (2022), 138-65

‘Words that might save necks: Philipp Khabo Koepsell, epistemic murder and poetic justice’. German Life and Letters 74 (2021), 511-56

‘Talking Back: Sharon Dodua Otoo’s Herr Gröttrup setzt sich hin and the Epistemology of Resistance’. German Life and Letters 73 (2020), 659-679

‘"The credibility of elves": narrative exclusion and prison writing’, in Kelly, M. and Westall, C. (eds), Prison Writing and the Literary World. London: Routledge 2020, 21-38.

(with Sveinung Sandberg) ‘“ISIS is not Islam”: Epistemic Injustice, Everyday Religion, and Young Muslims’ Narrative Resistance’. British Journal of Criminology 60 (2020), 1585–1605

(with Daniela Pisoiu) Colvin, S. and Pisoiu, D. (2020) ‘When Being Bad is Good? Bringing Neutralization Theory to Subcultural Narratives of Right-Wing Violence’. Studies in Conflict & Terrorism 43 (2020), 493-508

Why should criminology care about literary fiction? Literature, life narratives and telling untellable stories. Punishment & Society 17 (2015), 211-229. 

Edited books:

Sharon Dodua Otoo – Literature, Politics, Possibility. German Life and Letters special issue (2024) (ed. with Tara Talwar Windsor)

Epistemic Injustice and Creative Agency. Perspectives on Global Literature and Film, ed. with Stephanie Galasso. London: Routledge 2023

Women, Global Protest Movements and Political Agency: Rethinking the Legacy of 1968 [Vol 1], ed. with Katharina Karcher. London: Routledge 2019

Gender, Emancipation, and Political Violence: Rethinking the Legacy of 1968 [Vol 2], ed. with Katharina Karcher. London: Routledge 2019

The Routledge Handbook of German Politics and Culture. London 2015

Narratives and Identities in the Berlin Republic, ed. with Isabelle Hertner, and Joanne Sayner. German Politics and Society Special Issue, Spring/Summer 2015

The Feminine in German Culture, ed. with Charlotte Woodford. German Life and Letters Special Issue, October 2014

Women and Death: Warlike Women in the German Literary and Cultural Imagination, ed. with Helen Watanabe-O’Kelly. Rochester, NY: Camden House 2009

Masculinities in German Culture, ed. with Peter Davies. Edinburgh German Yearbook 2008

Myths and Mythmaking, ed. with Laura Martin, Alison Phipps, Christl Reissenberger. German Life and Letters Special Issue 2004