• Senior Lecturer (Comparative Literature)

telephone: 01413306407
email: Laura.Martin@glasgow.ac.uk

Research interests:

Laura's main research interests are in the literature of the 18th century and early 19th century, with particular emphasis on the works of Goethe and Kleist, women writers of the period (in particular Benedikte Naubert), the Novella and the Fairy Tale.  She has published on the above authors as well as on Musäus, Mörike, Büchner, Hawthorne, and Henry James.  Laura is particularly interested in the construction of gender throughout the Pre-and Post-French Revolutionary period as well as in the social and cultural conditions that determine literary production.  Further related interests include:  Romanticism; Grimms' Fairy Tales and their relationship to other tale production in Germany and elsewhere, the relationship of gender to (literary) genre; women writers in the 18th and 19th centuries; the Fantastic in literature, Anglo-German Relations in the Romantic era; Theories of Narrative, Gender Theory, and Comparative Interpretations of Fairy Tales.

Current research topics include a reflection on Comparative Literature/Intercultural Studies and their place on the Modern languages curriculum in British universities, and on the constructions of happiness in German Fairy Tales from around 1800.  A book-length project which will re-examine the gender constructions in Fairy Tales from the 18th and 19th centuries is now getting underway.

Areas of supervision:

Laura welcomes proposals for research topics for MPhil (Research) or PhD degrees in any of the following areas.  (Please see the main Comparative Literature webpage for further information about these degrees.)  Her languages are English, German and (some) French, and she especially welcomes comparative topics.

• The late 18th-century and 19th-century in German, American and British literature
• The History of the Fairy Tale
• Comparative Interpretations of Fairy Tales
• Women writers of the 18th/19th centuries
• The Novella
• Travel, intercultural crossings, translating the self
• The Fantastic in Literature
• German, British and American Romanticisms
• German authors: Goethe, Kleist, ETA Hoffmann, Kafka

Teaching:

Dr Martin is Head of Comparative Literature and teaches across the Programme, from First Year to Honours. Authors and topics she teaches or has taught range from Sophocles to Virginia Woolf, the Brothers Grimm, Toni Morrison, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Franz Kafka, German Romantic Poetry, Heinrich von Kleist, German Realism, ‘The Brothers Grimm and the European Fairy Tale’, and ‘German Women Writers in the Age of Goethe’. She organises and is a strong contributor on the two Honours Core Courses in Comparative Literature: ‘Theories of Reading’ and ‘Intercultural Readings’, which are introductory seminars/workshops on 20th and 21st century theoretical approaches to literature and culture.

As Convener of the MLitt in ‘Reading European Cultures’, Laura Martin also organises and teaches on the PG-level theories course, ‘Theorising Europe’. Special topics she has offered for the MLitt include German and English Romantic Poetry, the Bildungsroman, Cixous and Kristeva, and more. In addition, she has supervised and co-supervised and examined a number of Honours and MLitt Dissertations as well as several PhDs on 19th- and 20th-century topics.

Biography:

Dr Martin has been a lecturer at the university of Glasgow since 1995, moving from the German Section to Comparative Literature in 2005.  She was awarded a Ph.D. from the Institute of Liberal Arts at Emory University in 1996 for her comparative study of Goethe, Kleist, Hawthorne and James.  Before coming to Glasgow, Laura was a Lektorin at the University of Regensburg.  She is a keen amateur musician (a soprano) and performs everything from Bach and Mozart to Schubert and Wagner, Poulenc, Gershwin and Bernstein, as well as singing with the acclaimed Scottish Symphony Orchestra Chorus.