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:
- Critical race theory
- Epistemic injustice
- Literature, gender, “race” and culture
- Narrative theory and narrative ethics; narrative criminology
- Prisoner writing and arts in prisons
- Cross disciplinary research methods.
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 University of Oxford.
She was a Junior Research Fellow at St John’s College, Oxford; a Humboldt Fellow at Potsdam University; a Lecturer, Reader, and Eudo C. Mason Chair of German at the University of Edinburgh, and held chairs at the universities of Birmingham and Warwick before becoming Schröder Professor of German at Cambridge in 2014.
She is a steering committee member for the National Criminal Justice Arts Alliance and holds a Senior Prize Fellowship at the Bayreuth Humboldt Centre where she is collaborating with Dr Kyung-Ho Cha on the project Towards a Politics of Fiction.
Sarah also leads the research group Cultural Production and Social Justice with Dr Stephanie Galasso and co-convens the related project “Fictions of the Rechtsstaat”, a collaboration with the LMU Munich.
Recent PhD supervisions have been on politics and theatre; citizenship and the novel; conflict and normalization in German literature; women and leadership; public intellectuals and political violence; prison writing by women; and Herta Müller.
Other interests
The arts in society, theories of leadership.
Department link
http://www.mml.cam.ac.ukPublications, links and resources
- Colvin, S. (2020) ‘Talking Back: Sharon Dodua Otoo’s Herr Gröttrup setzt sich hin and the Epistemology of Resistance’. German Life and Letters. (in press)
- 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, pp 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. (online)
- 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, pp 493-508.
- Colvin, S. (2017) ‘Unerhört? Prisoner Narratives as Unlistened-to Stories and Some Reflections on the Picaresque’. Modern Language Review 112, pp 442-60
- Colvin, S. (2016) Leaning In: Why and How I Still Study The German. German Life and Letters 69, pp 123-41.
- Colvin, S. (2015) Why should criminology care about literary fiction? Literature, life narratives and telling untellable stories. Punishment & Society 17(2), pp 211-229.
- Colvin, S. (2015) ed, The Routledge Handbook of German Politics and Culture, London: Routledge.
- Colvin, S., Hertner, I., and Sayner, J. (2015) eds, The Importance of Being German: Narratives and Identities in the Berlin Republic. German Politics and Society, Spring/Summer 2015.
- Colvin, S. and Woodford, C. (2014) eds, The Feminine in German Culture. German Life and Letters Special Issue, Oxford: Wiley Blackwell.
- 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, pp 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. (Studies in German Literature, Linguistics, and Culture). 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. (Studies in German Literature, Linguistics, and Culture). Columbia, SC: Camden House.
- Colvin, S. (1999) The Rhetorical Feminine: Gender and Orient on the German Stage, 1647-1742 (Oxford Modern Languages and Literature Monographs). Oxford: Clarendon Press.
