Dr Ellen Pilsworth

My current research explores contemporary British responses to Nazism and the Holocaust. In my work I try to understand what information about Nazism was available to ‘ordinary people’ in Britain at the time, as well as news about the escalating persecution of Jews across Nazi-occupied Europe. 

I am working on a monograph, provisionally entitled Atrocity Stories: Anti-Nazi Refugee Autobiographies for British Readers in the Years of Appeasement and War (1933-45). In this study I explore autobiographical texts that were published by anti-Nazi refugees from Germany and Austria in Britain, for British readers. I consult archival material to show how these works were received by publishers, institutions such as the Ministry of Information and BBC, and readers at the time. This project has been generously funded by the British Academy and Wolfson Foundation (2020-24), and by a Martin Miller and Hannah Norbert-Miller Fellowship at the institute of Languages and Cultures, London (September-December 2023).
My previous research has mainly focussed on German literature from ca. 1750-1815, and I welcome applications for doctoral research projects related to any of the following themes:

• German and Austrian Exile Studies
• Refugee studies, migration histories
• Translation and publishing
• German Romanticism
• Cultural memory, and literary confrontations with past violence (war, the Holocaust, colonialism)
• Political and protest literature