About

Mary Cosgrove completed all of her degrees at University College Dublin where she was Lecturer in German from 2002-2004. She was appointed Lecturer in German at the University of Edinburgh in 2004 where she has been Reader in German since 2012. Her publications include Born under Auschwitz: Melancholy Traditions in Postwar German Literature (2014); (with Anna Richards, ed.), ‘Sadness and Melancholy in German-Language Literature and Culture,’ Edinburgh German Yearbook VI (2012); (with Anne Fuchs and Georg Grote eds.), German Memory Contests: The Quest for Identity in German Literature, Film and Discourse since 1990 (2006, 2nd ed. 2010); Grotesque Ambivalence: Melancholy and Mourning the Prose Work of Albert Drach (2004). Research and teaching interests include 20th century German-Jewish literature, post-1945 and contemporary German literature, recent German memory debates, Holocaust historiography, psychoanalysis, trauma theory, and European melancholy traditions. Her next project explores the connections between literature, culture and pathology with a particular focus on boredom, sloth, laziness and idleness.

Research interests

20th century German-Jewish literature, post-1945 and contemporary German literature, recent German memory debates, Holocaust historiography, psychoanalysis, trauma theory, and European melancholy traditions. Her next project explores the connections between literature, culture and pathology with a particular focus on boredom, sloth, laziness and idleness.

Teaching and supervision

Undergraduate modules

GE218-15 Pathologies of the Modern Self
GE438-15 Boredom in the Literature and Film of the Berlin Republic
GE401-30 Modern German Language 3 Translation

Administrative roles

• Director of Undergraduate Studies (Terms 2 and 3)
• Research Workshop convenor (Terms 2 and 3)

Selected publications

• Born Under Auschwitz: Melancholy Traditions in Postwar German Literature (Rochester NY: Camden House, 2014)
• Grotesque Ambivalence: Mourning and Melancholy in the Prose Work of Albert Drach (Tübingen: Niemeyer 2004)
• Sadness and Melancholy in German-Language Literature and Culture, eds. Mary Cosgrove and Anna Richards. Edinburgh German Yearbook VI (Rochester, NY: Camden House), 2012
• German Memory Contests: The Quest for Identity in German Literature, Film and Discourse since 1990, eds. Anne Fuchs, Mary Cosgrove and Georg Grote (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2006, 2nd paperback ed. 2010)
• Memory Contests: Cultural Memory, Hybridity and Identity in German Discourses since 1990, eds. Anne Fuchs and Mary Cosgrove. Special issue German Life and Letters 59 (April 2006)
• ‘Reinventing Invented Tradition: Melancholy in Postwar German Writing’, in ‘The German Language, National Socialism and the Shoah: New Literary and Linguistic Perspectives’, Edinburgh German Yearbook VIII, eds. Peter Davies, Andrea Hammel (Rochester, NY: Camden House, forthcoming 2014)
• ‘Heimat as Non-Place and Terrain Vague in Jenny Erpenbeck’s Heimsuchung and Julia Schoch’s Mit der Geschwindigkeit des Sommers’ New German Critique 116 (Summer 2012): 63-86
• ‘From Nobility to Sloth: Melancholy Self-Fashioning and the Hamlet Motif in Wolfgang Hildesheimer’s Tynset and Masante’, in Wolfgang Hildesheimer, eds. Rüdiger Görner, Isabel Wagner (Bern, Berlin: Peter Lang, 2012), 79-101
• ‘W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz’, in The Cambridge Companion to the German Novel since 1990, ed. Stuart Taberner (Cambridge UP, 2011), 195-210
• ‘Staatliche Körper, verkörperter Staat: Biopolitik in Albert Drachs >>Z.Z. das ist die Zwischenzeit<<, in Körperkult – Körperzwang – Körperstörung im Spiegel von Psychopathologie, Literatur und Kultur, eds. Dietrich von Engelhardt, Jürgen Barkhoff (Heidelberg: Matthes Verlag, 2010), 258-70

Qualifications

• BA and MA (University College Dublin)
• PhD (University College Dublin)