Professor Helen Finch

Profile

My main areas of research are in the representation of the Holocaust in German-language literature, queer identity and memory in German culture, and curriculum design. Linking all three is a concern with marginalised voices, poetics of resistance, and inclusivity, concerns which I also bring to my teaching.

I co-run the LCS Queer Area Studies Network, and am a member of the University’s Centre for Jewish Studies and the Centre for World Literatures.

I have worked at the University of Leeds since 2009, where I have held various teaching, leadership and research roles including Director of Student Education for the School of Languages, Cultures and Societies (2014–2017), Director of the Centre for Pedagogic Research in the Arts (PRiA, 2020–2023), and Director of German (2022-2024). I am also a member of the LCS Equality and Inclusion committee and the University LGBT+ staff network. 

Research interests

I work in the fields of queer memory, memory of the Holocaust, life writing and German Jewish literature. My recent monograph, German-Jewish Life Writing in the Aftermath of the Holocaust: Beyond Testimony (Camden House, 2023) examines the transnational literary careers of four German-Jewish literary witnesses to the Holocaust, H. G. Adler, Fred Wander, Edgar Hilsenrath and Ruth Klüger, looking at the way that emotion, exclusion from the canon, and a lifetime of witnessing are reflected in their later literary work.

Current Research Projects

Holocaust Translation and Transnational Ukrainian Memory: Together with Prof. Anja Tippner (Hamburg), I am working on a ‘Working in the Holocaust Translation Zone: Ethics and Poetics of Literature’. This includes a workshop held at the Warburg-Haus, University of Hamburg, in September 2023, and a forthcoming special issue of Eastern European Holocaust Studies.

Queer Holocaust Memory: This project examines the cultural memory of queer experiences in the Holocaust. I am about to publish new research on the history of queer Holocaust literature for the forthcoming Cambridge History of Holocaust Literature [eds McGlothlin, Taberner], and on gay German Jewish life writing of the Holocaust in a 2026 special issue of Holocaust Studies ‘Queer Experiences in the Holocaust’ edited by me and Ramsden.

Queer memories and futures in literature: This project responds to a cultural moment when there is a growing interest in queer history. At the same time, throughout Europe and globally, queer and trans communities are seeing a political backlash that seeks to erase queer history, creating a moral panic around young people’s engagement with queer history and culture, in association with movements that seek to limit bodily autonomy. This project seeks resources in the arts and creative practice for re-envisioning a liveable collective social future for queer subjects. This project is linked to my first monograph on queer masculine identities in the works of W. G. Sebald, Sebald's Bachelors: Queer Resistance and the Unconforming Life, which appeared with Legenda in 2013.

I am co-editor of the Peter Lang Women, Gender and Sexuality in German Culture book series, and serve as a member of the MLA Forum Executive Committee, LLC 20th- and 21st-Century German.

Postgraduate supervision

Recent postgraduate projects supervised include:

• Eden Hills, ‘Transnational transphobic alliances: Trans-exclusionary feminism, misogyny and bodily autonomy’ (PhD 2024-)
• Yi Tang, ‘Transcending Borders: Fansubbing, Transgender Representation, and Global Queerness’ (PhD 2024-)
• Laura Kiemle-Gabbay, Doctorate in Clinical Psychology (PhD 2024-)
• Hesther Farge, ‘Women's interwar travel fiction in the literature of Irmgard Keun and Jean Rhys’ (PhD 2023-present)
• Jiayin Song, ‘Gothic queer narrative and postcolonial representation in Lilian Lee's work’ (PhD 2023-present)
• Victoria Suvoroff, “The impact of exile: Using non-representational methodologies to examine displaced contemporary queer visual art practices between 2020-2024 in the UK” (PhD 2021–present)
• Min Zou, “The plays of David Henry Hwang: Queer aesthetics, selves, cultures” (PhD 2020–2024)
• Corey Hartley, “Dismantling the Binary: Exploring the interplay between Literature and the social positioning of gender in postmodern society” (PhD 2020–present)
• Hannie Phillips, “The poetics of post-Holocaust memorial” (PhD 2018–2022)
• Pete Freeth, “Look who's back in the frame: The translator's visibility in the digital paratextual framings of translated literary texts” (PhD 2018–2022)
• Ian Ellison, “Melancholy cosmopolitan novels. Late European fiction at the turn of the twenty-first century” (PhD 2015–2019)
• Dominic O'Key: "Creaturely Forms: Encounters with Animality in W. G. Sebald, J. M. Coetzee, and Mahasweta Devi" (PhD 2016–2019)
• Alexandru Bar: "The double identity of Tristan Tzara and Marcel Janco - the archives of an identity issue" (Performing the Jewish Archive Project PhD 2015–2018)
• John March: "German Exile Photographers in Britain 1933–45" (MAR 2014–2017)

I welcome approaches from students interested in researching the following areas:

• Comparative literature
• German literature
• The representation of the Holocaust
• Queer identities and poetics
• Queer memoir
• Gender and politics in German literature
• The works of Sascha Marianna Salzmann, Olga Grjasnowa, W. G. Sebald, H. G. Adler, Ruth Klüger, Edgar Hilsenrath, Antje Rávik Strubel, Fred Wander

Publications

Books

• Finch, HC, German-Jewish Life Writing in the Aftermath of the Holocaust: Beyond Testimony (Camden House, 2023)
• Finch HC, Wolff LL, Witnessing, Memory, Poetics. H. G. Adler and W. G. Sebald (Camden House, 2014).
• Finch HC, Sebald's Bachelors: Queer Resistance and the Unconforming Life (Oxford: Legenda, 2013).

Articles and Chapters

• In preparation, Finch HC, ‘Gay German-Jewish Holocaust Memoir ‘, forthcoming in special issue of Holocaust Studies ‘Queer Experiences in the Holocaust’, ed. HC Finch, Roseanna Ramsden
• In preparation, Finch HC, ‘Queer Holocaust LIterature since the 1970s’, The Cambridge History of Holocaust Literature (eds Erin McGlothlin, Stuart Taberner)
• Under review, Finch HC, ‘“Ich hatte Anne Franks Tagebuch gelesen und verstanden, dass ich nicht die einzige Frau war, die Frauen begehrte.” Queer memory in Olga Grjasnowa’s Der Russe ist einer, der Birken liebt and Sascha Marianne Salzmann’s Außer Sich’, forthcoming in Postmigrant Reconfigurations: New Approaches to Contemporary German-language Jewish cultural production, eds Maria Roca Lizarazu, Lizzie Stewart, Godela Weiss-Sussex
• Finch HC, "A Wende in representing the Holocaust in German literature? From Jurek Becker to W. G. Sebald", German Quarterly. 2023, 1– 15. https://doi.org/10.1111/gequ.12353
• Finch HC, “What remains of Peter Handke?”, The Austrian Riveter 2023, 197-199
• Finch HC, with Elliott C, McDonnell P ‘Diversifying the German Curriculum through Student Research’, in Transverse Disciplines: Working across and beyond Academic Communities Edited by: Simone Pfleger and Carrie Smith. U of Toronto Press, 2022
• Finch, HC, On teaching Handke: Canon and curriculum in the wake of the Nobel Prize. Collateral 2021, 31
• Finch HC, ‘Writing the Displaced Person: H. G. Adler’s Poetics of Exile’, Humanities, 8.3 (2019)
• Finch HC, 'Reconciliation, Revenge, Restitution. Edgar Hilsenrath’s and Ruth Klüger’s Late Writings as Holocaust Metatestimony', in German Jewish Literature After 1990, ed.Katja Garloff, Agnes Mueller (Camden House, 2018)
• Finch HC, ‘Ressentiment beyond Nietzsche and Amery; H. G. Adler between Literary Ressentiment and Divine Grace’ in Re-thinking Ressentiment. On the Limits of Criticism and the Limits of its Critics, ed. Jeanne Riou, Mary Gallagher (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2016), pp. 71–86
• Finch HC, ‘Prague Circles: H. G. Adler’s Kafkaesque Hope’ in H. G. Adler. Life, Literature, Legacy, ed. Julia Creet, Sara R. Horowitz and Amira Bojadzija-Dan (Evanston: Northwestern UP, 2016), pp. 251–272
• Finch HC, ‘Holocaust Translation, Communication And Witness In The Work Of H. G. Adler’, German Life and Letters, 68.3 (2015), 427–443
• Finch HC and Wolff LL, 'Introduction: The Adler-Sebald Intertextual Relationship as Paradigm for Intergenerational Literary Testimony', in Witnessing, Memory, Poetics: H. G. Adler and W. G. Sebald (Rochester: Camden House, 2014), pp. 1–24
• Finch HC, 'Generational Conflicts, Generational Affinities: Broch, Adorno, Adler, Sebald' in Witnessing, Memory, Poetics: H. G. Adler and W. G. Sebald (Rochester: Camden House, 2014), pp. 232–253
• Finch HC, '"Like refugees who have come through dreadful ordeals": The Theme of the Anglo-Irish in The Rings of Saturn', in A Literature of Restitution: Critical Essays on W. G. Sebald, eds Jeannette Baxter, Ben Hutchinson, Valerie Henitiuk, (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013), pp. 158–183
• Finch HC, 'Gender, Identity, and Memory in the Novels of Antje Rávic Strubel', in Women in German Yearbook 28 (2012), 81–97
• Finch HC, 'Elfriede Jelinek, Gier', in The Novel in German since 1990, ed. Stuart Taberner, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 151–164
• Finch HC, 'Recalling the goddess Pandora: From Utopia to Resignation, from Goethe to Peter Hacks in Irmtraud Morgner's Amanda', in Edinburgh German Yearbook vol. 3 (2009): Contested Legacies - Constructions of Cultural Heritage in the GDR, pp. 218–232
• Finch HC, 'Günter Grass and Gender', in The Cambridge Companion to Günter Grass, ed. Stuart Taberner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 81–95
• Finch HC, 'Günter Grass's account of German Wartime Suffering in Beim Häuten der Zwiebel: Mind in Mourning or Boy Adventurer?', in 'Germans as Victims' in The Literary Fiction of the Berlin Republic, eds Karina Berger, Stuart Taberner, (Rochester: Camden House, 2009), pp. 170–191
• Finch HC, '"Die irdische Erfüllung": Peter Handke's Poetic Landscapes and W. G. Sebald's Metaphysics of History', in W. G. Sebald and the Writing of History, eds Anne Fuchs, Jonathan Long (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2007), pp. 179–197

I have also written for publications including the TLS, and have recently released a podcast, Helen Finch & Alessio Baldini - Ukraine and The Voices of Those Left Behind: Jewish Novelists Natalia Ginzburg and Katja Petrowskaja in Dialogue. Ilkley Settee Seminar Podcast 6.3, April 2024

<h4>Research projects</h4> <p>Some research projects I'm currently working on, or have worked on, will be listed below. Our list of all <a href="https://ahc.leeds.ac.uk/dir/research-projects">research projects</a> allows you to view and search the full list of projects in the faculty.</p>

• Transnational Holocaust Memory

Qualifications

• Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (2014)
• PhD in German literature (Trinity College Dublin)
• M. Phil in Modern German Thought (University of Glasgow)
• B. A. in German and Russian (Trinity College Dublin)

Professional memberships

• Women in German Studies
• Association of German Studies in Britain and Ireland
• German Studies Association of America
• Modern Language Association of America

Student education

I teach German cultural studies at all levels, and contribute to cross-School and cross-Faculty modules on intercultural studies, world literature, the representation of the Holocaust, queer cultures, translation, and visual culture. 

I have regularly given invited talks on pedagogies, including contributing to a roundtable on ‘Sitting with the Discomfort, or Whose Emotional Discomfort Matters?’ at lead roundtable, ‘Emotionally demanding research and pedagogies’, Association of German Studies 2020, and one on ‘Best Practices for Transnationalising the Classroom’ (UCD, March 2023), now available as a podcast. I have published on diversifying the German curriculum.

Research groups and institutes

• German
• Centre for World Literatures
• Centre for Jewish Studies
• Gender
• Literary studies
• Memory, Trauma and Violence
• Conflict
• Queer Area Studies Network

Current postgraduate researchers

• Corey Hartley
• Hesther Farge

<h4>Postgraduate research opportunities</h4> <p>We welcome enquiries from motivated and qualified applicants from all around the world who are interested in PhD study. Our <a href="https://phd.leeds.ac.uk">research opportunities</a> allow you to search for projects and scholarships.</p>