Dr. Eva-Maria WINDBERGER

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

Eva’s research foci include:

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

Her postdoctoral research project is concerned with negotiations of (trans)cultural identities and belonging in British East and South East Asian theatre, including new forms of digital performance. In this context, she has co-edited two books with Judith Neder (TU Dresden), Anglo-East Asian Exchanges in Literature, Culture, and Media (Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming 2026) and Interdisciplinary Approaches to British Chinese Cultures: Identities, Belongings, Plurality (Palgrave Macmillan, 2026). Eva is also a member of the UniGR Center for Border Studies Working Group Bordertextures.

Eva teaches widely on Anglophone literatures and cultures 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. In cooperation with the Doctoral School in Humanities and Social Sciences (DSHSS) and Julia Schwarzmeier at Trier University, she co-organises a biannual transnational writing retreat for early-career researchers. From 2019 – 2025, she was a regular participant in the annual panel discussion “Englische Lieblingsromane” in Trier.

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. Since 2025, Eva has been a member of the DSHSS Go-to-Team.

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 David Mitchell’s novels at Trier University in 2020.