Dr Julia Wurr

Julia Wurr joined the English Department as a postdoc in September 2019. She studied English and French as well as International Relations and Translation Studies at the Universities of Trier, Liège and Oxford. From 2016 to 2019, she worked as a doctoral researcher at the International Research Training Group “Diversity” at the Universities of Trier, Saarbrücken and Montreal. In 2019, she completed a Ph.D. thesis exploring the poetics and socio-political functions of Neo-Orientalism, anti-Muslim racism and securitisation in English-, French- and German-language fiction about the Arab uprisings. The thesis was supervised by Wolfgang Klooß (Trier) and Frauke Matthes (Edinburgh).

Julia Wurr currently serves as equal rights representative ("Gleichstellungsbeauftragte") of the Faculty (Fachbereich II).

Main Areas of Research and Teaching

Orientalism and Neo-Orientalism

Arab Uprisings (‘Arab Spring’)

Postcolonial Studies

Literature and Terrorism

Canadian Literature

Shakespeare and Early Modern Drama

Publications

Literary Neo-Orientalism and the Arab Uprisings: Tensions in English, French and German Language Fiction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, forthcoming.

"Neo-Orientalism and the Poetics of Insecurity in Bodyguard." Sicherheit und Differenz in historischer Perspektive/Security and Difference in Historical Perspective. Ed. Sigrid Ruby and Anja Krause. Baden-Baden: Nomos, forthcoming.

"L’Orientalisme, le 'Printemps arabe' et le dialogue interculturel sur le marché littéraire européen." Dialogues interculturels à l’époque coloniale et postcoloniale. Représentations littéraires et culturelles – Orient, Maghreb et Afrique occidentale (de 1830 à nos jours). Ed. Hans-Jürgen Lüsebrink and Sarga Moussa. Paris: Éditions Kimé, 2019. 165-84.

 

Presentations

10 July 2021: "Anti-Natalism, the Dystopian Double Standard and the Anthropocene." Humanities for the Anthropocene: Values, Principles, and Practices, University of Puget Sound and University of Victoria.

May 2021: "Between the Metrics of Terror and the Terror of Metrics: The 2015 Paris Attacks in Frederika Amalia Finkelstein’s Survivre." Le Malaise contemporain. Société et subjectivité dans la littérature française (1990–2020), Abtei Neumünster, Luxemburg (postponed until December 2021).

26 Feb 2021: "On the Danger of Security: Neo-Orientalism and the Poetics of Insecurity." Sicherheit und Differenz in historischer Perspektive, Justus-Liebig-Universität, Gießen.

16 Nov 2018: "Knowledge, Power, and Security: Orientalism and Securitisation in Contemporary Francophone Fiction." Orientalism and the Francophone Postcolonial World: Legacies of Edward W. Said. Society for Francophone Postcolonial Studies Annual Conference, University of London.

10 Nov 2017: "Literary Perspectives on the 'Arab Spring': A Post-Orientalist Window of Opportunity?" Dialogues interculturels à l’époque coloniale et postcoloniale. Représentations littéraires et culturelles – Orient, Maghreb et Afrique occidentale (de 1830 à nos jours), German Historical Institute, Paris.

21 July 2017: "Translating Fear and Alterity: Neo-Orientalist Poetics of In_Security in Post-'Arab Spring' Fiction." Translating Fear. 10th Colloquium on Translation Studies in Portugal, Lisbon.