Barry Murnane

Barry Murnane is Associate Professor of German at the University of Oxford. His research spans topics from the early 1700s to the present day, but he has particular interests in the literature and culture of the ‘threshold period’ around 1800, modernism (especially Kafka), Gothic and Horror, and contemporary drama. A comparative literature scholar by training, the areas of his research that intersect closest with the GRK “Literatur und Öffentlichkeit” are his work on the genealogy of literary criticism (Literaturkritik nach 1700 ed. by B. Murnane et al [2019]), the relationship between popular culture and literature (Zwischen Popularisierung und Ästhetisierung ed. by B Murnane & Rainer Godel [2014]), pop literature (“Gaps, Great Divides and Other Stories. Transferbedingte Signaturen des Populären in Theorie und Literatur um 1968”, in: Die amerikanischen Götter.

Transatlantische Prozesse in der deutschsprachigen Popkultur seit 1949 [2015], 65-88), and representations of neoliberalism and globalization in contemporary literature, drama, theater, and film (“‘Toleranz – du nervst mich so’: Reinventing Lessing’s Nathan der Weise for the Contemporary German Stage”, in: The German Quarterly 93.4 [Fall 2020], 447-465)