Prof. Dr Ralf Hertel

Degree: MA, Dr. phil. (FU Berlin), Dr. phil. habil. (Hamburg)

Ralf Hertel was appointed Professor of English Literature at Trier University in 2015. He also taught at the Free University Berlin, the Humboldt University in Berlin, and Hamburg University. He has published widely in the field of Early Modern Studies as well as Contemporary Literature, and has also worked as a journalist for the "Süddeutsche Zeitung". He was a guest professor at the Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan, in 2015 and hosts the annual literary event „Englische Lieblingsromane“ at the Stadtbibliothek Trier. Ralf Hertel is also director of the Centre for Canadian Studies (Zentrum für Kanada-Studien ZKS) at Trier University.

Main Areas of Teaching and Research

  • Shakespeare and Early Modern England
  • Contemporary Literature / New English Literatures
  • Anglo-Asian Encounters
  • Canadian Literature and Culture
  • Sensuousness in Literature
  • Poetry

Supervised Projects

  • Tereza Brala: Selfhood and the Lyrical „I“ in Aestheticist and Modernist Poetry.
  • Barbara Plunien: Language and Identity in Contemporary Anglo-East Asian Fiction.
  • Diana Thiesen: An Intersectional Reading of Contemporary Chinese Canadian Fiction (completed)
  •  Eva-Maria Windberger: The Poetics of Empowerment in David Mitchell’s Novels (completed

Selected Publications

Monographs

Edited Books

Selected Articles

  • „Introduction: Failures East and West – Cultural Encounters between East Asia and Europe.“ In: Failures East and West: Cultural Encounters between East Asia and Europe, ed. Ralf Hertel and Kirsten Sandrock (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2023), 1-12.
  • “The Encounter that Wasn’t: Imagining East Asia in Richard Hakluyt.” In: Failures East and West: Cultural Encounters between East Asia and Europe, ed. Ralf Hertel and Kirsten Sandrock ( Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2023), 15-28.
  • (with Eva-Maria Windberger) “Empowering Contemporary Fiction.” In: Empowering Contemporary Fiction in English: The Impact of Empowerment in Literary Studies, ed. Ralf Hertel and Eva-Maria Windberger (Boston: Brill, 2021), 1-15.
  • “Xiaolu Guo’s Empowering Fictions.” In: Empowering Contemporary Fiction in English: The Impact of Empowerment in Literary Studies, ed. Ralf Hertel and Eva-Maria Windberger (Boston: Brill, 2021), 149-159.
  • “John Agard.” In: The Blackwell Companion to British and Irish Poetry, 1960-2010, ed. Wolfgang Görtschacher und David Malcolm. London: Blackwell Wiley, 2021, 443-451.
  • “W.H. Auden: Journey to a War (1939).” In: Handbook of British Travel Writing, ed. Barbara Schaff. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2020, 485-500
  • “England and Its Others.” In: Handbook of English Renaissance Literature, ed. Ingo Berensmeyer. Boston: De Gruyter, 2019, 136-154.
  • 赫特尔 (Ralf Hertel): ‘文本中的耳朵: 约翰·伯杰的《到婚礼去》.‘ In: 约翰·伯格: 到婚礼去. (Chinese edition of John Berger, To the Wedding. Trans. Silvano Zheng. Beijing: Imaginist, 2019.)  237-266. [Chinese translation of ‘The Ear in the Text: John Berger’s To the Wedding (1995)’ from Making Sense: Sense Perception in the British Novel of the 1980s and 1990s (Amsterdam, New York: Rodopi, 2005).]
  • “Au Dung and Y Hsiao Wu Looking for China: Strategies of Unwriting Space in W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood‘s Journey to a War (1939)“. In: People and Cultures in Motion: Environment, Space and the Humanities, ed. Ralf Hertel and Christian Soffel (Taipeh: Chengda University Press, 2018), 51-58.
  • “Writing China Across the Globe: Xiaolu Guo in Conversation with Ralf Hertel”. In: Anglistentag 2016 Hamburg – Proceedings, ed. Ute Berns and Jolene Mathieson (Trier: WVT, 2017), 1-10.
  • "Faking It: The Invention of East Asia in Early Modern England". In: Early Encounters between East Asia and Europe: Telling Failures, ed. Ralf Hertel and Michael Keevak (New York: Routledge, 2017), 31-49.
  • (with Michael Keevak:) “Telling Failures: Early Encounters between East Asia and Europe“. In: Early Encounters between East Asia and Europe: Telling Failures, ed. Ralf Hertel and Michael Keevak (New York: Routledge, 2017), 1-9.
  • “Unwriting Trauma, Unwriting Asia: Post-Ethnic Identity in Madeleine Thien’s Certainty“. In: Wor(l)ds of Trauma : Canadian and German Perspectives, ed. Wolfgang Klooß (Münster, New York: Waxmann, 2017), 213-222.
  • "Introduction: On John Berger - Telling Stories". In: On John Berger: Telling Stories, ed. Ralf Hertel and David Malcolm (Leiden, Boston: Rodopi / Brill, 2015), 11-28.
  • "The Body of the Text: 'To the Wedding', 'From A to X', and the Corporeality of John Berger's Later Fiction". In: On John Berger: Telling Stories, ed. Ralf Hertel and David Malcolm (Leiden, Boston: Rodopi / Brill, 2015), 143-161.
  • “Postkoloniales Gelächter: Zur Erfahrung der Inkongruenz in Zadie Smiths White Teeth”. In: Wer lacht, zeigt Zähne: Spielarten des Komischen, ed. Johann N. Schmidt, Felix Sprang and Roland Weidle. Trier, WVT, 2014, 259-266.
  • “The Senses in Literature: From the Modernist Shock of Sensation to Postcolonial and Virtual Voices.” In: A Cultural History of the Senses in the Modern Age, 1920-2000, ed. David Howes. vol. 6 of A Cultural History of the Senses, ed. Constance Classen. London: Bloomsbury, 2014, 173-194.
  • “Kriegsstück oder Antikriegsstück? Von der Subjektivierung des Krieges in Shakespeares Heinrich V”, in: Der Krieg hat kein Loch: Friedenssehnsucht und Kriegsapologie in der Frühen Neuzeit, ed. Mark Föcking and Claudia Schindler. Heidelberg: Winter, 2014, 141-154.
  • “Ousting the Ottomans: The Double Vision of the East in The Travels of the Three English Brothers (1607).” In: Early Modern Encounters with the Islamic East: Performing Cultures, ed. Sabine Schülting, Sabine Lucia Müller and Ralf Hertel. Farnham: Ashgate, 2012, 135-151.
  • “Bragging Turks and Winning Words: Solo-Performances in Anglo-Ottoman Encounters - The Case of Christopher Marlowe's Tamburlaine the Great.” In: Early Modern Solo-Performances, ed. Ute Berns. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2010, 249-268.
  • “'Mine Italian brain 'gan in your duller Britain operate most vilely' – Cymbeline and the Deconstruction of Anglo-Italian Differences.” In: Performing National Identity: Anglo-Italian Cultural Transactions, eds. Ralf Hertel and Manfred Pfister. Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft 114. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2008, 45-62.
  • “Dramentextanalyse.” In: Handbuch Literaturwissenschaft, ed. Thomas Anz, vol. 2. Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler, 2007, 121-138.