Professor Helen Finch
- Position: Professor of German Literature
- Areas of expertise: German Literature; Literature and the Holocaust; literature; trauma; gender; queer studies; memory; German studies; identity; translation; Holocaust Studies; comparative literature
- Email: H.C.Finch@leeds.ac.uk
- Phone: +44(0)113 343 3510
- Location: 2.16 Michael Sadler Building
- Website: Bluesky | LinkedIn | Googlescholar | ORCID
Profile
I co-direct the LCS Centre for Global Queer Cultures and Politics, and am a member of the University’s Centre for Jewish Studies and the Centre for World Literatures. I am also a member of the University LGBT+ staff network.
Responsibilities
- Deputy Director of Research and Innovation (Research Culture)
Research interests
Current Research Projects
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’ co-edited with Rosie Ramsden.
Queer memories and futures in literature: This project seeks to trace the operation of queer memory in world literature, focussing particularly on memory in exile and generational memory. 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 chair of the MLA Forum Executive Committee, LLC 20th- and 21st-Century German.
Postgraduate supervision
Recent postgraduate projects supervised include:
- Circulating Queer Affect: The Translation-mediated Reception of Qiu Miaojin on Online Social Media (PhD 2025-)
- Love and Loss, Memory and Identity: A Modern Reading of Twenty-First Century Anglophone Queer Fiction Set During the Holocaust (PhD 2025-)
- ‘Transnational transphobic alliances: Trans-exclusionary feminism, misogyny and bodily autonomy’ (PhD 2024-)
- ‘Transcending Borders: Fansubbing, Transgender Representation, and Global Queerness’ (PhD 2024-)
- Doctorate in Clinical Psychology (PhD 2024-)
- ‘Gothic queer narrative and postcolonial representation in Lilian Lee's work’ (PhD 2023-present)
- “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)
- “The plays of David Henry Hwang: Queer aesthetics, selves, cultures” (PhD 2020–2024)
- “Dismantling the Binary: Exploring the interplay between Literature and the social positioning of gender in postmodern society” (PhD 2020–present)
- “The poetics of post-Holocaust memorial” (PhD 2018–2022)
- “Look who's back in the frame: The translator's visibility in the digital paratextual framings of translated literary texts” (PhD 2018–2022)
- “Melancholy cosmopolitan novels. Late European fiction at the turn of the twenty-first century” (PhD 2015–2019)
- "Creaturely Forms: Encounters with Animality in W. G. Sebald, J. M. Coetzee, and Mahasweta Devi" (PhD 2016–2019)
- "The double identity of Tristan Tzara and Marcel Janco - the archives of an identity issue" (Performing the Jewish Archive Project PhD 2015–2018)
- "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 Sasha 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
- Forthcoming, Finch HC, ‘From Disintegration to Departure in Mirna Funk’s Balagan (2026)’, Yearbook for Jewish European Literature Studies
- Forthcoming, Finch HC, ‘Queer Holocaust LIterature since the 1970s’, The Cambridge History of Holocaust Literature (eds Erin McGlothlin, Stuart Taberner)
- Forthcoming, Finch HC, ‘Queer memory in Olga Grjasnowa’s Der Russe ist einer, der Birken liebt and Sasha Marianna Salzmann’s Außer Sich’, Postmigrant Reconfigurations: New Approaches to Contemporary German-language Jewish cultural production, eds Maria Roca Lizarazu, Lizzie Stewart, Godela Weiss-Sussex
- Finch HC (2026). Constructing a gay German Jewish identity in Holocaust memoirs. Holocaust Studies, 1–22. https://doi.org/10.1080/17504902.2025.2604433
- 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 recorded podcasts on my research, recently
- 'On memory and queer politics', Prof. Helen Finch in conversation with Dr. Paul Leworthy on the Connecting Politics podcast, October 2026 https://open.spotify.com/episode/1JPcTLfZ1t1zBupgqYHT97?si=1Ru1J59xTu23V0MRYIliSw
- 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
Co-investigator (Co-I)
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
- 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