Professor Sarah Colvin
Sarah Colvin is the Schröder Professor of German and a Fellow of Jesus College.
Academic interests
Sarah Colvin's academic interests include:
- Cultural production and social justice
- Critical race theory
- Epistemic injustice
- Narrative theory and narrative ethics; narrative criminology
- Prisoner writing and arts in prisons.
Degrees obtained
- BA, Oxford.
- MA, Oxford.
- DPhil, Oxford.
Awards and prizes
- Senior Prize Fellowship, Bayreuth Humboldt Centre, 2020-21
- Leverhulme Research Fellow, 2007-8.
- Humboldt Fellow, 2000-2001.
- Senior Scholar, Christ Church, Oxford, 1992-95.
- Hanseatic Scholar, 1990-92.
- Heath Harrison Scholar, 1987.
- Stevenson Scholar, Exeter College, Oxford, 1986-90.
Biography
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 Humboldt Fellow at Potsdam University; Lecturer, Reader, and Eudo C. Mason Professor of German at the University of Edinburgh, and she held chairs at the universities of 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 Stephanie Galasso and Dr Tara Talwar Windsor, and co-convenes the related projects “Fictions of the Rechtsstaat”, a collaboration with the LMU Munich, and “Towards a Politics of Fiction” with the University of Bayreuth (Dr Kyung-Ho Cha).
She is an Advisory Group member for the National Criminal Justice Arts Alliance.
PhD supervision
Recent PhD supervisions have been on the politics of women’s friendship; public intellectuals and political violence; citizenship and the novel; conflict and normalization in German literature; women and leadership; politics and theatre; prison writing by women; and Herta Müller.
Other interests
Cultural production and social justice.
Department link
http://www.mml.cam.ac.ukPublications, links and resources
- Colvin, S. (2022) Shadowland: The Story of Germany Told by its Prisoners. London: Reaktion.
- Colvin, S. (2022) ‘Freedom time: Temporal Insurrections in Olivia Wenzel’s 1000 Serpentinen Angst and Sharon Dodua Otoo’s Adas Raum’. German Life and Letters (January).
- Colvin, S. (2021) ‘Words that might save necks: Philipp Khabo Koepsell, epistemic murder and poetic justice’. German Life and Letters 74, 511-56.
- Colvin, S. (2020) ‘Talking Back: Sharon Dodua Otoo’s Herr Gröttrup setzt sich hin and the Epistemology of Resistance’. German Life and Letters.
- Colvin, S. (2020) ‘"The credibility of elves": narrative exclusion and prison writing’, in Kelly, M. and Westall, C. (eds), Prison Writing and the Literary World. London: Routledge, 21-38.
- Colvin, S. and Sandberg, S. (2020) ‘“ISIS is not Islam”: Epistemic Injustice, Everyday Religion, and Young Muslims’ Narrative Resistance’. British Journal of Criminology.
- 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, 493-508.
- Colvin, S. (2017) ‘Unerhört? Prisoner Narratives as Unlistened-to Stories and Some Reflections on the Picaresque’. Modern Language Review 112, 442-60.
- Colvin, S. (2016) Leaning In: Why and How I Still Study The German. German Life and Letters 69, 123-41.
- Colvin, S. (2015) Why should criminology care about literary fiction? Literature, life narratives and telling untellable stories. Punishment & Society 17(2), 211-229.
- Colvin, S. (2015) ed, The Routledge Handbook of German Politics and Culture, London: Routledge.
- Colvin, S. and Woodford, C. (2014) eds, The Feminine in German Culture. German Life and Letters Special Issue.
- Colvin, S. (2014) Dancing Through the Next Minefield, or How and Why Should We Read the Stories of German Women Prisoners? German Life and Letters 67, 589-603.
- Colvin, S. (2010) Mephistopheles, Metaphor, and the Problem of Meaning in Faust. Publications of the English Goethe Society (PEGS) LXXIX(3), pp 159-71.
- Colvin, S. (2009) Ulrike Meinhof and West German Terrorism: Language, Violence, and Identity. Rochester, NY: Camden House.
- Colvin, S. and Watanabe-O'Kelly, H. (2009) eds, Women and Death: Warlike Women in the German Literary and Cultural Imagination since 1500, Rochester, NY: Camden House.
- Colvin, S. and Davies, P. (2008) eds, Masculinities in German Culture. Rochester, NY: Camden House.
- Colvin, S. (2003) Women and German Drama, 1860-1945: Playwrights and their Texts. Columbia, SC: Camden House.
- Colvin, S. (1999) The Rhetorical Feminine: Gender and Orient on the German Stage, 1647-1742. Oxford: Clarendon.
