Dr Tom Zille, Lucy Cavendish
tz274@cam.ac.uk
Biographical Information
After training as a bookseller in Leipzig, I studied English and German Literature and Linguistics at the Humboldt University of Berlin and at Cambridge University, where I was a scholar of the German Academic Scholarship Foundation. I have served as a syndic of the Cambridge University Botanic Garden and as a convenor of the Twentieth Century and Contemporary Literature Research Seminar at the Faculty of English. I am currently Director of Studies in English and Tutor at Lucy Cavendish College and a Lecturer at the English Faculty. Together with Dee Evetts, I convene the Cambridge Haiku Group.
Research Interests
I work mainly on English and German literature and the history of the book from the early modern period to the mid-twentieth century, with a particular interest in Elizabethan and Metaphysical poetry, the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century novel and the history of literary Realism, literary Modernism and its competitors, and twentieth-century and contemporary short-form poetry. Favourite topics include Anglo-German literary relations; the intersections of literary studies and linguistics; processes of influence, reception, and canonization; representations of class and gender; feminist poetics; genre development; writers’ prolificacy and industriousness; figurations of tragedy and comedy; Mediaevalism; the social and literary history of translation and cultural transfer; stylistics (particularly questions of rhythm, syntax, and lexicon); the historicity of language in fiction, post-colonial engagements with the tradition of the realist novel, haiku/senryu, and the ways in which political beliefs inscribe themselves into literary works. Outside modern philology and book history, I occasionally pursue research in the history of religion, with particular interests in patristics and the history of moral theology.
Areas of Graduate Supervision
I am always interested in supervising work related to the research areas named above.
Selected Publications
Books, Journal Articles, Reviews, and Essays
Christian Felix Weißes Werk im europäischen Kontext. Kinder- und Jugendliteratur, Kulturtransfer und populäre Aufklärung, ed. by François Genton, Sebastian Schmideler, and Tom Zille (Heidelberg: J. B. Metzler, forthcoming 2024)
Christian Felix Weiße the Translator. Cultural Transfer and Literary Entrepreneurship in the Enlightenment, imlr books 15 (London: University of London Press, 2021), xiii, 221 pp.
Reviews in Translation and Literature, 31.1 (2022), 94-99, Etudes Germaniques, 77.1 (2022), 124-25, and Modern Language Review, 118.2 (2023), 273-274
“Georgette Heyer and the Language of the Historical Novel,” in Georgette Heyer, History, and Historical Fiction, ed. by Samantha Rayner and Kim Wilkins (London: UCL Press, 2021), pp. 187-211
Review of Comparing Grief in French, British and Canadian Great War Fiction (1977-2014), by Anna Branach-Kallas and Piotr Sadkowski, Comparative Literature Studies, 57.3 (2020), pp. 562-564
“A Change of Mind: The Reception of Treadwell Walden’s The Great Meaning of Metanoia (1896),” History of Humanities, 5.1 (2020), pp. 97-110
“ ‘All My Heroines Must Like Him:’ Circumscribing the Spouse in Jane Austen’s Plan of a Husband,” in The Anthology of Babel, ed. by Ed Simon (New York: Punctum, 2020), pp. 101-118
“Inevitable Answers: The Joke and its Relation to Social Equilibrium in the Novels of Ivy Compton-Burnett,” Women: A Cultural Review, 30.1 (2019), pp. 27-42
Translations
Tomás Cohen, “Durch ein Geflecht zur Unordnung. Cluster, Sprünge, Plan,” transl. from the English, TOLEDO TALKS (published online 6th November 2021)
Deborah Eisenberg and Wallace Shawn, “Anfang 1989,” transl. from the English, Sprache im Technischen Zeitalter, 238 (June 2021), pp. 205-207
Kim Sherwood, “Testament,” excerpt transl. from the English and introd., Sprache im Technischen Zeitalter, 235 (September 2020), pp. 374-379
Adania Shibli, “Dieses Meer Gehört Mohammad Al-Khatib,” transl. from the English, Sprache im Technischen Zeitalter, 232 (December 2019), pp. 417-421
A.L. Kennedy, “Was Niemand Hören Will,” transl. from the English, Der Tagesspiegel, 15 November 2019
Miscellaneous Publications
“Weiße, Christian Felix (1726-1804),” Germersheimer Übersetzerlexikon (published June 2021)
“German and English Literature of the Inter-War Period,” Bulletin of the Friends of Cambridge University Library 37 (2016/2017), pp. 37-39
“A Collection of German and English Literature, 1919-39,” The Book-Collector 65.1 (Spring 2016), pp. 59-69
