Dr Sophia Buck

I studied German Literature and Philosophy in Heidelberg, Prague and Oxford. Between 2019–2023, I undertook my doctoral research at Merton College Oxford. During that time, I was also an affiliated researcher of the research network ‘‘“Kulturtransfer und “kulturelle Identität” – Deutsch-russische Kontakte im europäischen Kon-text’’. In 2021–22, I was a visiting researcher at the ENS in Paris and at the program for ‘World Literature’ at the Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung in Berlin. I organised international conferences with third-party funding, presented my research across Europe and published widely in English and German on intercultural transfer, disciplinary histories, and 20th century literary criticism in German, French and Russian. Since 2021, I serve as elected Member of the International Walter Benjamin Society. 

At Oxford, I held stipendiary and non-stipendiary Lectureships at Lincoln, Somerville and Wadham, before joining LMH as a Junior Research Fellow.

While my research is rooted in German literature and thought, I am interested in the intersection between different European cultural, theoretical and literary contexts and how the dialogue between these cultures shaped broader intellectual debates in the interwar and post-war years. My interests in research and teaching cover literary and visual culture of the 20th century, entangled European history of ideas and literary theory, material research culture and intercultural histories of disciplines.

My doctoral research, Moscow – Berlin – Paris: Walter Benjamin’s Intercultural Spaces of Comparison (Merton Scholar Prize 2022; Sylvia Naish Lecture Prize 2023) disentangles Benjamin’s proclaimed ‘new Optic’ as a form of reversed cultural perspective, which shapes an intercultural reflexivity underpinning his ‘dialectics of seeing’ in the ‘Surrealism’ essay and later Arcades Project.

The project unpacks how Benjamin’s intercultural experiences in the 1920s – his trips to both France and the USSR and his attempt to establish himself as a leading journalistic expert on both cultures – shaped his more fundamental approach to literary criticism, cultural theory and history, and his wider understanding of the role of the intellectual. In the course of my thesis I have engaged with material such as different French and Russian journals, associated infographic material, Benjamin’s contribution for the Great Soviet encyclopedia and a lot of material from visual culture the USSR and France, which has allowed me to bring new insights to German Studies and to European intellectual history. First, by examining Benjamin less as a mediator but rather as a critic of intercultural mediation processes, I hope to clear the way for a new understanding of how certain media and institutional networks shaped intercultural imaginaries in European cultural thought. Second, bringing together archival material from across Europe not only interrogates disciplinary blindspots in a Benjamin reception (that focuses on national cultural settings only). It also serves as a starting point to comparatively historicise different European academic cultures in their treatment of Benjamin.

My new, comparative research project, Enemy Studies: Intellectual and Material Topigraphies of UK German and Slavonic Studies, moves from the intercultural crossings of literary criticism towards those of philologies. The wake and aftermath of the Second World War catalysed the outlook of those relatively young disciplines through being ‘at war’ with their subject. German turned into ‘enemy studies’ during the interwar period and Slavonic flourished during the Cold War. 

The aim of this project thereby is to interrogate not only strategies of individual figures but also consider patterns of disciplinary crossings between scholarship, activism and public engagement. One angle to unpack scholarly agency, then, concerns evolving frameworks of analysis, such as topographical imaginaries, and corpus revisions. Therefore, the question of how military and political antagonism historically interacted with academic cultures further concerns the translocation of material, namely the histories and trajectories of UK Germanic and Slavonic collections. Having a closer look at material research cultures will help to promote knowledge transfer between library sciences and literary studies.

Undergraduate Teaching

• Prelims Paper III & IV (German: Introduction to Poetry, Prose, Plays)
• Paper II (Translation into German), all year groups
• Bridge Essay Seminar (German & History)
• FHS Paper VIII (German: Period Paper, 1770 – contemporary Literature)
• FHS Paper X (Special Authors) – Kafka

Graduate Teaching & Lectures

• Comparative Literature Core Teaching Lecture: ‘Untranslatables and Universals: A Misunderstanding about Understanding?’ Hilary Term 2025
• FHS Lecture Course (Faculty of Modern Languages, Oxford): ‘Archiving Kafka: From Modern Body Protocols to Institutional Records’, Trinity Term 2024
• Prelims Lectures Paper IV (on Brecht and Lang), Michaelmas Term 2023
• ‘Graduate Lecture: ‘Politics of Criticism and European Imaginaries: Walter Benjamin’, Graduate Lecture Scheme 2022 & 23.

Edited Volumes

Walter Benjamin in the European East: Networks, Conflicts, and Reception, co-editor, with Caroline Adler (forthcoming with Routledge in 2025).

British German Studies and the Two World Wars, Special Issue of ANGERMION, XV, 2022, guest editor, with Andreas Schmid.

Journal Articles (*peer-reviewed)

*‘Walter Benjamin’s Outsiders: Against ‘Optical Illusions’ of National Communities’, New Benjamin Studies (forthcoming) 

*‘Walter Benjamin and Ssofia Fedortschenko: Intercultural and Intermedial Aspects of a “Failed Transfer”’, Walter Benjamin: The Journalist as Producer’, special issue of Monatshefte 115:2 2023, ed. by Carolin Duttlinger and Daniel Weidner, 170–188        

‘A “Baedeker durch das geistige Paris”: Walter Benjamin’s Literary Histories as Travel Guides’, Friends of Germanic Studies at the ILCS (2023),   15–19.

with Caroline Adler, ‘Walter Benjamin in the East: Networks, Conflicts, and Reception’, Journal of the History of Ideas Blog, published 05 Dec 2022, https://jhiblog.org/2022/12/05/walter-benjamin-in-the-east-networks-conflicts-and-reception/

with Andreas Schmid, Introduction: ‘A Discipline at War: German Studies in the UK, 1914–45’, ANGERMION, XV, 2022, 31–54.

with Aoife Ní Chroidhéain, ‘Modern German Studies Graduate Seminar 2020/21: German Studies at Oxford – Archives and Utopias of a Community of Practice’, Oxford German Studies, 50.4, 2021, 1–3.

Chapters in peer-reviewed Books

‘Moskau–Berlin–Paris: “Optische Täuschungen” und Walter Benjamins Kritik transkultureller Vermittlungsprozesse’, in Kulturen der Kritik und das Projekt der Moderne in Ostmitteleuropa, ed. by Sibylle Schönborn, (Bielefeld: Aisthesis, 2023), pp. 129–146.

‘“K-Punk”. Bloggen in Großbritannien als “Netz-Werk-Statt”’, in Small Critics: Transmediale Konzepte feuilletonistischer Schreibweisen der Gegenwart, ed. by Oliver Ruf and Christoph Winter (Königmann & Neuhausen, 2022), pp. 201–218.

‘Die differentielle Identität des Anti-Ödipus – ödipale Königs-Figur vs./und schizoide Spaltungs-Figur’, in Das Königsparadigma. Der König als Synthese und Konvergenzpunkt künstlerischer, philosophischer und wissenschaftlicher Darstellungen, ed. by Raluca Dimian (Kaiserslautern: Parthenon Verlag 2021), pp. 33–52.

Podcasts

Twelve Conversations about Kafka: ‘Russian Literature’. Conversation with Prof Karen Leeder, https://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/series/conversations-kafka (3 June 2024).