Dr Hannah Scheithauer

Prior to taking up my post at Lady Margaret Hall, I held a Departmental Lectureship in French at the University of Oxford (St John's College). I studied French, German, Comparative Literature, and Critical Translation at Oxford (B.A., M.St. D.Phil.), and spent time at Göttingen University, École Normale Supérieure in Paris, and Freie Universität Berlin.

I teach widely across the modern period of German literature and culture, from the late 18th century to the present day. I also offer classes in translation from and into modern German.

German Prelims Papers II, III, IV
FHS Papers I, II, VIII, X

- ‘Cycles of Violence and Fictions of the “Grey Zone” in Jérôme Ferrari’s Où j’ai laissé mon âme (2010)’, French Studies, https://doi.org/10.3828/fs.2026.80.3.2.
- ‘Subversive Temporalitäten des Sprachwechsels bei Odile, book chapter in AfterWords: Nachheit und Nachleben in der Lyrik, ed. Lisa Memmeler and Jan Derksen, Berlin Universities Publishing, Edition AVL – Neue Reihe 3 (2026), https://doi.org/10.14279/depositonce-25504.
- ‘Spectral Time and the Ethics of “Multidirectional Memory”: Anouar Benmalek’s Fils du Shéol (2015)’, Holocaust Studies (2025), https://doi.org/10.1080/17504902.2025.2563927.
- ‘Anne Weber’s Annette, ein Heldinnenepos (2020): Comparative Memory and the Work of Literature’, forthcoming with German Life and Letters.

In the Career Development Fellowship at Lady Margaret Hall, I am investigating cultural responses to migration in twentieth- and twenty-first-century Germany. In particular, I consider the extent to which an understanding of contemporary migratory movements can benefit from a historical perspective that revisits the contested legacies of the Vertriebene – Germans displaced from the country's former Eastern regions at the end of the Second World War.

My doctoral thesis, which I completed in 2025, explored the intersections of post-Holocaust and postcolonial memories in contemporary literatures in French and German. The project focused on narrative texts and worked through a series of comparative case studies, bringing together works by authors including Ingeborg Bachmann, Assia Djebar, Boualem Sansal, Jérôme Ferrari, Anne Weber, Anouar Benmalek, and Sharon Dodua Otoo. I was especially interested in the ways in which literary texts articulate ethical complexity, charting individual moral positions as they move across these highly contested histories. In so doing, literature responds productively to ongoing cultural controversies surrounding the comparison of Nazism and colonialism and encourages readers to reflect on the ethical stakes of memory culture today.