Tom Zille, Wolfson

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. Since 2020, I have been reading for a PhD at Cambridge, as 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 serving as Director of Studies in English at Lucy Cavendish College.

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, as well as late Modernism and its competitors. 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; 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, and the ways in which political beliefs inscribe themselves into literary works. Outside modern philology and book history, I also pursue research in the history of religion, with particular interests in patristics and the history of moral theology.

Selected Publications

Recent and Forthcoming 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 2023)

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 and Etudes Germaniques, 77.1 (2022), 124-25

“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

Review of Ivy Compton-Burnett, by Barbara Hardy, English Studies, 99.8 (November 2018), pp. 1003-1005

Recent and Forthcoming 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

Upcoming Talks and Conference Papers

“Who Will Read the Future? Posthumanism and Precarious Procreation in Late-Twentieth Century Anglophone Fiction,” The Child of the Future Conference, Cambridge 30th June – 1st July 2022

“Austenian Irony in Women’s Fiction of the Interwar Years,” Women and Comedy 1890-1950, Cambridge 17th – 18th September 2022