Ben Schofield is Senior Lecturer in German at King’s College London. He joined King’s in 2008 as Lecturer in German and Comparative Literature, having previously held positions at the University of Cambridge (as Associate Lecturer in Dutch and German) and the Institute of Modern Languages Research (as Lecturer in Modern German Culture).
His most recent research has focused on the representation and perception of German and European identity and culture extra muros, that is to say in global contexts. His particular interest is in the processes and infrastructures that promote, challenge and define notions of cultural identity within mechanisms of transnational circulation. His work encompasses traditional literary and cultural-historical studies, performance studies, and the intersection between cultural studies and European cultural policy/cultural diplomacy. He is currently working on a monograph A Moral Compass: The Germanic Tradition in American Fiction, which assesses both the mechanisms that underpin, and the aesthetic ramifications, of German-US cultural interaction from the post-war period onwards. His other area key of interest is the cultural relationship between Germany, Europe and Shakespeare, reflected in his ongoing project Import/Export: Staging “Unser Shakespeare”. His previous research focused predominantly on questions of German identity, German Realism, and the German culture industry, and he is the author of the monograph Private Lives and Collective Destinies. Class, Nation and the Folk in the Works of Gustav Freytag, and the co-edited volumes The German Bestseller in the Late Nineteenth Century and The Racehorse of Genius. Literary and Cultural Comparisons.
As part of the Beyond Enemy Lines project, he is supervising the PhD project of Julia Vossen on the comparative history of British and German “Rubble Literature”, together with the project-lead, Dr Lara Feigel. His particular interest within the project’s themes is in the mechanisms that underpinned author-exchanges between England/America and Germany/Austria in the post-war period; the consequences of this infrastructural process on the works produced and their aesthetic; and the cross-fertilisation of English/American and German/Austrian texts through their translation, transnational exchange, and mutual influence.