Catherine Smale studied French and German at the University of Cambridge, where she also completed an MPhil in European Literature and Culture and a PhD in German Literature, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. She joined King’s in 2011, following a post-doctoral research fellowship at the Freie Universität Berlin.

Research Interests and PhD Supervision

• 20th- and 21st-century German literature
• Gender theory and women’s writing
• Literature and political activism
• Neurodiversity and neuroqueering
• Disability Studies

Catherine Smale’s research focuses on 20th- and 21st-century German literature and cultural history. She is particularly interested in the relations between literary form, political activism, gender and disability.

One strand of her work focuses on women writers in the former German Democratic Republic. Her first book, Phantom Images: The Figure of the Ghost in the Work of Christa Wolf and Irina Liebmann (London: MHRA, 2013), examined the work of two major East German authors, showing how they engage with ongoing legacy of the Third Reich and German division. The book contributed to contemporary memory debates, proposing a major re-reading of German culture since 1989.

A second strand in Catherine’s research focuses on the connections between literature, gender and political activism in the first half of the 20th century. She is particularly interested in the often forgotten voices of female authors who were politically active in this period and the strategies they used to provoke and activate their readership. Catherine has published on a range of writers from this period, including two co-edited journal issues – one on female authorship in the Wilhelmine Empire and the Weimar Republic, and the other on the aftermath of the First World War in German culture.

Catherine’s current research project focuses on the topic of neurodiversity in contemporary German-language literature and culture. The project aims to shed new light on how writers and artists give expression to non-normative modes of neurocognitive and sensory perception and how they expose or challenge socially constructed norms of neurotypicality. The project makes a distinctive contribution to both German Studies and Disability Studies by asking what it means to write or create art from the perspective of a neuromarginalized subject in the German-language context.

Catherine has supervised a range of MA and PhD dissertations on topics in literature, film, performance and cultural memory. Any students wishing to undertake postgraduate study with her are welcome to get in touch.

Teaching

Catherine Smale currently teaches at all levels in the Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures, with modules spanning literature, culture and history from the Middle Ages to the present, as well as translation. She has led several cross-Modern Languages modules at BA and MA level and co-designed two cross-period modules which explore unusual connections between medieval and early modern culture and the present day. Since 2022, she has been leading a project on neurodiversity and inclusive teaching practices, funded by the Faculty of Arts and Humanities.

Expertise and Public Engagement

Catherine Smale regularly presents her research through public talks and podcasts. She has given talks at the Southbank Centre and the Institute for Cultural Inquiry, collaborated with curators at both Tate Britain in London and the Bröhan Museum in Berlin, and organised public film screenings as part of the German Screen Studies Network. She has also served on the judging panel for the Schlegel-Tieck Prize awarded by the Society of Authors. As Admissions and Outreach Lead in the Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures, she regularly gives talks at local schools and leads A-level workshops and taster events.

Selected publications

• Catherine Smale, ‘Staging Failure? Berta Lask’s “Thomas Münzer” (1925) and the 400th Anniversary of the German Peasants’ War’, German Life and Letters, 73:3 (July 2020), 365-82.
• Catherine Smale and Tara Talwar Windsor (eds), Aftermath: German-Speaking Culture in the Wake of World War I. A special issue of Oxford German Studies, 49:4 (December 2020).
• Caroline Bland, Catherine Smale and Godela Weiss-Sussex (eds), Women Writing Heimat in Imperial and Weimar Germany. A special issue of German Life and Letters, 72:1 (January 2019).
• Catherine Smale, ‘Towards a Late Style? Christa Wolf on Old Age, Death, and Creativity in Stadt der Engel oder The Overcoat of Dr. Freud’, in Christa Wolf: A Companion, ed. by Sonja Klocke and Jennifer Hosek (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2018), p. 181-200.
• Catherine Smale, Phantom Images: The Figure of the Ghost in the Work of Christa Wolf and Irina Liebmann (London: MHRA, 2013).