Dr. Eva-Maria WINDBERGER

Eva joined the Institute of English Studies as a Postdoctoral Researcher in September 2024.

Eva’s main research foci include:

• Contemporary British Fiction, David Mitchell
• Empowerment in Literary Studies
• British East and South East Asian Theatre and Film
• Theatre Studies and Performativity
• Representation and Visibility in the Contexts of Migration and Diaspora
• Postcolonial Literature, Authorship, and Displacement
• Literature and Intersectionality
• Adaptations and Remediations of Shakespeare’s Hamlet

Her postdoctoral research project is concerned with negotiations of (trans)cultural identity and belonging in British East and South East Asian theatre, including new forms of digital performance. She is currently co-editing two book projects with Judith Neder (TU Dresden), Anglo-East Asian Exchanges in Literature, Culture, and Media and Interdisciplinary Approaches to British Chinese Cultures – History, Representation, Diversity (Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming).

Eva teaches widely on 20^th and 21^st century Anglophone literatures and culture, Modernist aesthetics, women’s writing, as well as feminist and queer criticism at BA and MA level. Most recently, she has taught classes on Postcolonial literature and the history of British theatre from 1945 until today in the BCE English Studies

Eva has published open access and with large-audience international publishers. She is a regular participant in the annual panel discussion “Englische Lieblingsromane” in Trier (https://lieblingsromane-trier.de/). Together with Dr Britta Colligs (Trier University), she co-organises both a biannual academic writing retreat and a literary studies colloquium for early-career researchers.

Eva’s first journal article, titled “No Man is an Island”: Tracing Functions of Insular Landscapes in David Mitchell’s Fiction”, won the Publication Award of Trier University’s Graduate Centre in 2018. Her PhD thesis, The Poetics of Empowerment in David Mitchell’s Novels, was awarded the Prize for Excellent Dissertations by the Freundeskreis Trierer Universität e.V. in 2021.

From 2015 – 2024, Eva worked as a Doctoral and then Postdoctoral Researcher and Lecturer at Trier University. She was a member of the research initiative Transkulturalität und ihre Grenzen: Wechselbeziehungen zwischen Schlüsselregionen in Europa und Ostasien from 2021 – 2023 and conducted teaching and research stays at Kobe University, Japan, and the University of Manitoba, Canada.

Eva studied English, Philosophy / Ethics, and Education at the Universities of Trier and Cambridge. She completed her PhD on the strategies and functions of empowerment in the novels of David Mitchell at Trier University in 2020.