Wallraven
PD Dr. Miriam WALLRAVEN
English Literature and British Cultural Studies
Akademische Oberrätin (Associate Professor)
Room 5.E.16
miriam.wallraven@uni-wuerzburg.de
Phone: +49 931 31-88742
Stellvertretende Frauenbeauftragte Philosophische Fakultät (Deputy women's representative Faculty of Philosophy)
Office Hours
Sprechstunde:
Dienstag 10:30 bis 12:30
Anrechnung von Leistungen aus dem Ausland:
Vor dem Aufenthalt (ERASMUS): Für eine Prüfung der Anrechenbarkeit im Rahmen eines Erasmus Learning Agreements, senden Sie das Learning Agreement sowie Kursbeschreibungen an erasmus.anglistik@uni-wuerzburg.de
Nach dem Aufenthalt (alle Auslandsaufenthalte): Die Anrechnung erfolgt durch das Einreichen Ihrer digitalen Unterlagen. Bitte beachten Sie unbedingt die Informationen über die dazu benötigen Unterlagen, da sonst keine Anrechnung erfolgen kann
Informationen zur Anrechnung von Leistungen aus dem Ausland
Betreuung von Abschlussarbeiten:
Wenn Sie bei mir eine BA Thesis, eine MA Thesis oder eine Zulassungsarbeit schreiben möchten, sollten Sie auf jeden Fall mindestens eines meiner Seminare besucht haben und dieses mit einer benoteten schriftlichen Arbeit abgeschlossen haben.
If you would like to write your Bachelor Thesis, Master Thesis or "Zulassungsarbeit" under my supervision, you should have attended at least one of my seminars and completed it with a graded term paper.
Fields of interest and research
- Migration, displacement, and movement in 20th/21st century literature
- Feminism and Gender Studies
- Religious Cultures, spirituality, and occultism in the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries
- Narratology
- Genre Theories
- Utopian/dystopian literature
- Gothic literature
- Early modern gender constructions in literature
- Postmodern literature and film
Current research projects
- Moving Narratives – Narrating Movement: Migration and Displacement in English-speaking Literature from and about the Balkans
- Poems about Poets: The British Poetic Tradition between Intertextuality and Interpersonality
Selected courses:
- Politics, Postcolonialism and Magic: Reading Salman Rushdie
- Liminality in Fantastic Literature
- Migration and Life Writing between (South-)Eastern Europe and the Anglophone World
- Contemporary Irish Life Writing
- Christian Poetry Through the Ages
- Der Literaturnobelpreis: Das herausragendste Werk gewinnt? Autoren & Autorinnen auf der großen Bühne (Ringvorlesung)
- The Image of the Witch in Literature (Poetry and Prose)
- Revolutionary Feminism: Women's Writing in the 1790s between Politics and Sensibility
- Queer Postcolonial Literature
- Reading the Classics: Gulliver's Travels
- Introduction to Poetry Analysis
- The Figure of the Vampire in Literature
- Hybrid genres and genders: Angela Carter's literary experiments
- Staatesexamensklausur: Narrative und expositorische Texte im 19. Jahrhundert
- Feminist Dystopia
- English Short Stories
- Reading the Classics: Jane Eyre
- Refugee Tales: New British Refugee Literature
- 19th Century British Women Authors
- Postmodern Novels
- Analysing narrative fiction: Margaret Atwood
- Literature of Migration
- Religious Poetry
- Reading Feminist Key Texts from the 18th to the 20th Century
- The Condition of England Novel in the 19th Century
- Dystopias of Surveillance and Control in Literature and Film
- Adventure Literature: Imaginary Travelogues from the Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Century
- Metafictional Multiplot Novels
- War and Literature: Contemporary British Novels
- Early Modern Women Authors: Cavendish and Behn
- The Occult and the Religious in Twentieth-Century Literature
- Postcolonial Literature, Spirituality, and Politics
- Cross-Dressing in Early Modern Drama and Prose
- Utopian Worlds: Gender and Politics in 20th Century Literature
- British Women's Travel Writing from the 17th to the 19th Century
- Gender and Utopia/Dystopia
- Introduction to Literary Studies
- Introduction to the Analysis of Prose
- The (R)Evolution of Feminist Writing
- Academic Writing in English
Academic pathway
- Akademische Rätin (Associate Professor) at Julius-Maximilians-University Würzburg since April 2017
- Wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin (Assistant Professor) at Eberhard Karls University Tübingen until March 2017
- Habilitation from Tübingen University (2012). Published by Routledge in 2015 as Women Writers and the Occult in Literature and Culture: Female Lucifers, Priestesses, and Witches.
- 2007-2008: Postdoc scholarship at the International Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture (GCSC), Gießen University
- PhD from Tübingen University (2006). Published by Königshausen & Neumann in 2007 as A Writing Halfway between Theory and Fiction: Mediating Feminism from the Seventeenth to the Twentieth Century.
- 1995-2001: Study of English and German Literature (M.A.) at Eberhard Karls University Tübingen and at Edinburgh University (M.A thesis: "Gender Travels: Die Verschiebung der Geschlechterrollen in Margaret Cavendishs imaginären Reisen "Assaulted and Pursued Chastity" und Blazing World)
Membership in scholarly associations
- Deutscher Anglistenverband
- International Margaret Cavendish Society
- European Narratology Network
- Deutsche Gesellschaft für das Studium britischer Kulturen
- GAPS: Gesellschaft für Anglophone Postkoloniale Studien
- Irish Studies Würzburg
- European Federation of Associations and Centres of Irish Studies
International Guest Lectureships
- University of Novi Sad (April 2023, Erasmus+)
- Jawaharlal Nehru University New Delhi (February 2020, Literature in a Globalized World - DAAD)
- University of Sarajevo (March 2018, Erasmus+)
- Jawaharlal Nehru University New Delhi (November 2018, Literature in a Globalized World - DAAD)
Publications
Monographs and Edited Collections
Configurations of Migration: Knowledges - Imaginaries - Media. New York, Berlin: De Gruyter 2023 (Open Access)
In a global context in which phenomena of migration play an ever more important role, the ways individual and collective experiences of migration are covered in the media, represented in culture, and interpreted are coming under increasing scrutiny. This book explores the complex relationship between creative engagements with migration on the one hand, and forms of knowledge about migration on the other, inquiring into the ways aesthetic practices are intertwined with knowledge structures. The book responds to three pressing research questions. First, it analyses how fictional texts, plays, images, films, and autobiographical accounts mediate forms of knowledge about migration. Second, it identifies the ways in which specific media approaches and aesthetic practices influence people’s ideas about and awareness of migratory experiences in a globalized world. Finally, it delineates how historical perspectives help us compare epistemological approaches to migration in the nineteenth, twentieth, and early twenty-first centuries, and how these approaches affect the way critics and the public responded to and thought about different forms of (forced) migration. Bringing together renowned scholars working across disciplines, it investigates the possibilities and limitations that different media present when it comes to reflecting on, communicating, and imagining experiences of migration, and how these representations in turn create ways of knowing and understanding migration.
Examining the intersection of occult spirituality, text, and gender, this book provides a compelling analysis of the occult revival in literature from the 1880s through the course of the twentieth century. Bestselling novels such as The Da Vinci Code play with magic and the fascination of hidden knowledge, while occult and esoteric subjects have become very visible in literature during the twentieth century. This study analyses literature by women occultists such as Alice Bailey, Dion Fortune, and Starhawk, and revisits texts with occult motifs by canonical authors such as Sylvia Townsend Warner, Leonora Carrington, and Angela Carter. This material, which has never been analysed in a literary context, covers influential movements such as Theosophy, Spiritualism, Golden Dawn, Wicca, and Goddess spirituality. Wallraven engages with the question of how literature functions as the medium for creating occult worlds and powerful identities, particularly the female Lucifer, witch, priestess, and Goddess. Based on the concept of ancient wisdom, the occult in literature also incorporates topical discourses of the twentieth century, including psychoanalysis, feminism, pacifism, and ecology. Hence, as an ever-evolving discursive universe, it presents alternatives to religious truth claims that often lead to various forms of fundamentalism that we encounter today. This book offers a ground-breaking approach to interpreting the forms and functions of occult texts for scholars and students of literary and cultural studies, religious studies, sociology, and gender studies.
This book is focused on the surprisingly large number of feminist women writers in literary history who use different genres for their feminist ideas while subverting or transgressing established boundaries between fictional and theoretical writing. In particular, texts by such diverse authors as Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Hays, Mary Robinson, Harriet Martineau, Olive Schreiner, Virginia Woolf, the French Feminists Hélène Cixous and Monique Wittig, Margaret Cavendish, and Michèle Roberts are analysed. This chronological indepth reading of feminist texts is based on the interrelation of content, genre and discourse. The study provides the first analysis of the phenomenon of the gendering of genre and feminists’ troubled involvement in ‘theory’ as well as ‘literature’. In this way, key questions concerning the emergence of feminism during the last four hundred years are presented in a new and revealing light; e.g., for what reason did Mary Wollstonecraft not only write her famous feminist treatise A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, but also a novel in which she tests the arguments of her theoretical treatise by means of fiction? What is the significance of Virginia Woolf’s “Novel-Essay” The Pargiters, which seeks to connect theoretical and fictional parts by juxtaposing them? How can the mixture of genres be interpreted which Catherine Clément attributes to the texts of Hélène Cixous as a “writing halfway between theory and fiction”?
Articles and Book Chapters
"'Bilingual Silence'? New Anglophone Literature from the Balkans and its Migrational Metamultilingual Mode." Mapping World Anglophone Studies: English in A World of Strangers. Eds. Pavan Kumar Malreddy and Frank Schulze-Engler. New York: Routledge, 2025. 104-119.
"Brexit, borders, barriers, identity": Connected Forms of Liminality in Kerri ní Dochartaigh's Irish Memoir Thin Places (2022). History in Stories: The Irish Past and the Challenges of the Present. Eds. Ina Bergmann and Maria Eisenmann. Anglo Amerikanische Studien/Anglo-American Studies. Berlin: Peter Lang, 2024. 145-157.
"As Told to": The Mediation of Refugee Voices in Contemporary Short Fiction. Globalization and Planetary Ethics: New Terrains of Consciousness. Eds. Simi Malhotra, Shraddha A. Singh, and Zahra Rizvi. London, New York: Routledge, 2024. 143-153.
"'No narrative to make sense of what had happened': The Genres of Narrating Migration during the Yugoslav Wars in English-Speaking Literature." Configurations of Migration: Knowledges - Imaginaries - Media. Eds. Jennifer Leetsch, Frederike Middelhoff and Miriam Wallraven. New York/Berline: De Gruyter 2023. 135-151.
(with Jennifer Leetsch and Frederike Middelhoff) "Introduction: Configurations of Migration." Configurations of Migration: Knowledges - Imaginaries - Media. Eds. Jennifer Leetsch, Frederike Middelhoff and Miriam Wallraven. New York/Berline: De Gruyter 2023. 1-13.
(with Jennifer Leetsch and Frederike Middelhoff) "Concluding Remarks: (Strange) Migratory Encounters." Configurations of Migration: Knowledges - Imaginaries - Media. Eds. Jennifer Leetsch, Frederike Middelhoff and Miriam Wallraven. New York/Berline: De Gruyter 2023. 219-224.
(with Ksenija Kondali). "'Witness Testimony': Surviving, Witnessing, and Writing Women’sTrauma in Margaret Atwood’s
The Testaments: Re-Examining Gender Concepts and Identities in Discourse(s) and Practice(s) Across Periods and Disciplines. Proceedings Fourth International Conference on English Language, Literature,Teaching and Translation Studies (CELLTTS). University of Sarajevo, 2022. 357-377.
"Zwischen Monster und Übermensch: Die Figur des Vampirs in der englischsprachigen Literatur." Monster, Chimären und andere Mischwesen in den Text- und Bildwelten der Vormoderne. Eds. Brigitte Burrichter und Dorothea Klein.Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann, 2022. 339-364.
"Kennedy, A. L.: Day." Kindlers Literatur Lexikon. Ed. H. L. Arnold. Stuttgart: J.B. Metzler, 2021.
"'O! My Unenlightened Country-Women!' Education and Enlightenment in Theoretical Feminist Texts of the 1790s."Feministische Aufklärung in Europa – The Feminist Enlightenment across Europe. Eds. Isabel Karremann und Gideon Stiening. Aufklärung 32 (2020): 267-289.
"'I Suffer from Border Syndrome': The Palimpsest of Borders in Transcultural Texts of Migration." Belgrade English Language and Literature Studies: BELLS90 Proceedings vol. 2 (2020): 447-462
"Gedichte über Dichter: Die Etablierung einer literarischen Tradition der Selbstreferentialität in England zwischen Intertextualität und Interpersonalität." Formen der Selbstthematisierung in der vormodernen Lyrik. Ed. Dorothea Klein. Hildesheim: Weidmann, 2019. 287-302.
"Reiseliteratur als Kontaktzone und Schreibort: Lady Mary Wortley Montagu als Mittlerin zwischen den Kulturen." Zwischen Kulturen: Mittler und Grenzgänger vom 17. bis 19. Jahrhundert. Eds. Joachim Eibach und Claudia Opitz-Belakhal. Hannover: Wehrhahn Verlag, 2018. 71-89.
"Angela Carter, Nights at the Circus (1984)." The English Novel, 1900-2000: Text and Theory. Ed. Christoph Reinfandt. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2017.
"'We are making one story, yes?' The Poetics of Interconnection in Postmodern Literature in a Global Age." EJLS: European Journal of Language and Literature Studies 4/1 (2016): 8-16.
"'We are making one story, yes?' The Poetics of Interconnection in Postmodern Literature in a Global Age." First ICELL International Conference on English Language and Literature: Proceedings Book. Eds. Mahmut Terci and Ilda Poshi. Tirana: Shkolla e Lartë "Hëna e Plotë" (Bedër University), 2016.
"'To Make a History From This Kind of Material is Not Easy': The Narrative Construction of Cultural History in Contemporary Fiction." ZAA: Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik 2014, 62 (2): 131-148.
"Spirituality and Politics? Spiritual Models of Culture and Methods of Worldmaking in Postmodern Utopian Texts" Literature and Spirituality in the English-Speaking World. Eds. Kathie Birat and Brigitte Zaugg. Bern: Peter Lang, 2014. 31-46.
"Gender in War – Gender at War? Femininities and Masculinities in Contemporary British War Novels." All Equally Real: Femininities and Masculinities Today. Eds. Anna Pilinska and Harmony Siganporia. Oxford: Inter-Disciplinary Press, 2014. 57-67.
"Reiseliteratur als Kontaktzone und Schreibort. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu als Mittlerin zwischen den Kulturen." zeitenblicke 11/1, (November 2012),
http://www.zeitenblicke.de/2012/1/Wallraven/index_html, URN: urn:nbn:de:0009-9-34171
"'Apple, are you ready to make contact?' The magic of the computer and the internet in post-modern esoteric texts." EJES: European Journal of English Studies, The Esoteric in Post/Modernism 15/3 (2011): 237-49.
"'Hexe-Werden: Identitätskonstruktionen der Hexe und Prozesse der Umwertung im 20. Jahrhundert." Identität in den Kulturwissenschaften: Perspektiven und Fallstudien zu Identitäts- und Alteritätsdiskursen. Eds. Sonja Altnöder, Martin Lüthe, Marcel Vejmelka. Trier: WVT, 2011. 209-22.
"Who's afraid of Witches, Goddesses, and Women Occultists? The Importance of a 'Spiritual and Occult Turn' in Connection with Gender for Literary and Cultural Studies." Proceedings Anglistentag 2008 Tübingen. Trier: WVT, 2009. 35-44.
"Sally Miller Gearhart." Encyclopedia of Contemporary LGBTQ Literature of the United States. Vol. 1. Ed. Emmanuel S. Nelson. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2009. 252-3.
"Susan Griffin." Encyclopedia of Contemporary LGBTQ Literature of the United States. Vol. 1. Ed. Emmanuel S. Nelson. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2009. 274-5.
"Zami: A New Spelling of My Name." Encyclopedia of Contemporary LGBTQ Literature of the United States. Vol. 2. Ed. Emmanuel S. Nelson. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2009. 679-81.
"'A mere instrument' or 'proud as Lucifer'? Self-presentations in the Occult Autobiographies by Emma Hardinge Britten (1900) and Annie Besant (1893)." Women's Writing 15/3 (2008): 390-411.
"'I intreat the ingenuous Reader': Margaret Cavendish’s prefaces in the context of reader-response theory and Roland Barthes' 'texts of bliss'" In-Between: Essays & Studies in Literary Criticism 16/1 (2007): 73-82.
"Anna Barbauld." Great Lives from History: The Eighteenth Century, 1701-1800. Pasadena: Salem Press, 2006. 87-89.
"Catherine Macaulay." Great Lives from History: The Eighteenth Century, 1701-1800. Pasadena: Salem Press, 2006. 621-623.
"Helene Lange." Great Lives from History: The Nineteenth Century, 1801-1900. Pasadena: Salem Press, 2006. 1307-1309.
"'A failure'? Feminist theory in Mary Wollstonecraft's fictional The Wrongs of Woman: or, Maria." Post-Scriptum 5 (2005): www.post-scriptum.org.
"Harriet Martineau's Autobiography." Encyclopedia Of Women's Autobiography. Vol 1. Eds. Jo Malin and Victoria Boynton. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2005. 256-260.
"Anne Conway." Great Lives from History: The Seventeenth Century, 1601-1700. Vol 1. Ed. Larissa Juliet Taylor. Pasadena: Salem Press, 2005. 187-189.
"'My Spirits long to wander in the Air...': Spirits and Souls in Margaret Cavendish's Fiction between Early Modern Philosophy and Cyber Theory." EMLS: Early Modern Literary Studies 10 (2004): http://www.shu.ac.uk/emls/10-1/wallspir.html.
"'Authoress of a whole world': The empowerment and narrative authority of 17th- and 18th-century English women writers in real and fictional travelogues." In-Between: Essays & Studies in Literary Criticism 13:2 (2004): 135-149.
Reviews
"Anja Müller. Framing Childhood in Eighteenth-Century English Periodicals and Prints, 1689-1789." Anglia, 128/1 (2010): 152-155.
"Ingo Berensmeyer. Angles of Contingency. Literarische Kultur im England des siebzehnten Jahrhunderts." Anglia, 127/3 (2009): 540-543.
"Nancy Copeland. Staging Gender in Behn and Centlivre: Women's Comedy and the Theatre." Gender Forum: Gender Roomours II' 16 (2006).
"Erica Longfellow: Women and Religious Writing in Early Modern England." Anglia 124/2 (2006): 373-376.
"'Famous, infamous, or anonymous?' Alexis Easley: First-Person Anonymous. Women Writers and Victorian Print Media." IASL 2006.
"Felicitas A. Nussbaum. The Limits of the Human: Fictions of Anomaly, Race, and Gender in the Long Eighteenth Century." Gender Forum: Imagendering 11 (2005).
"Als Ermutigung für unser Geschlecht: Berühmte Englische Frauen der Frühen Neuzeit." literaturkritik.de 3 (March 2004): http://www.literaturkritik.de/public/rezension.php?rez_id=6843&ausgabe=200403
"Geoffrey Sill: The Cure of the Passions and the Origins of the English Novel." ZAA 1.2 (2003): 211-212.
"Christina Hughes. Key Concepts in Feminist Theory and Research." Gender Forum: AnyBody's Concerns 6 (2003).
"Penelope Deutscher. A Politics of Impossible Difference: The Later Work of Luce Irigaray." Gender Forum: Gender Debat(tl)ed 5 (2003).
