Announcement of the new Schröder Professor of German

The Schröder Professor of German plays a leading role in enhancing public understanding of German in the English-speaking world.

The post, currently held by Professor Nicholas Boyle, was created in 1909 thanks to a benefaction from the London merchant bank J. Henry Schröder & Co., now known as Schroders plc.

Professor Colvin studied German language and literature at Oxford University and completed her DPhil at Hamburg and Oxford, writing on women and Turkish characters in early opera and drama.

She was a Junior (postdoctoral) Research Fellow at St John’s College, Oxford, researching women and theatre, and in 1997 took up a lectureship at the University of Edinburgh. Two books, The Rhetorical Feminine: Gender and Orient on the German Stage  and Women and German Drama were published in 1999 and 2003.

In 2004 she was appointed to the Eudo C. Mason Chair of German at Edinburgh, and published a study of the German terrorist Ulrike Marie Meinhof (Ulrike Meinhof and West German Terrorism) in 2009. From 2010-12 she was Director of the DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service) Institute for German Studies at Birmingham, one of a network of prestigious DAAD centres for German Studies worldwide. She returned to a “regular” professorship of German at Warwick in January 2013.

Her research interests include gender and culture, the representation and justification of violence, and literature’s function and meaning in society. She is currently researching writing by prisoners and the uses of literature in prisons.

As well as lecturing and writing, Professor Colvin is on the editorial boards of the German Monitor, the Publications of the English Goethe Society (PEGS) and The Bithell Series. She is also currently the Vice-President of the Association for German Studies (AGS).

Speaking about her appointment, Professor Colvin said: “I am the second woman Schröder Professor (the first was Eliza Marian Butler in 1944). This is a remarkable post that brings with it the privilege of working with and developing what is already one of the best German departments in the world, and opportunities to share and debate issues around German-language literature, politics, and culture, in history and in the world now.”

The Department of German and Dutch at Cambridge is a leading institution in the field of German Studies and has always achieved excellent results in successive national research assessment exercises, as well as sharing in the outstanding rating awarded to the Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages in the last Teaching Quality Assessment.