Marie Kolkenbrock holds a PhD from the University of Cambridge (2014) and is a Branco Weiss Fellow in the Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures at KCL. Marie’s academic work is informed by an interest in the ways psyche, society, and culture are inextricably linked and mutually constitutive to one another. Her current project is concerned with ideals of cultivated interpersonal and emotional distance in twentieth and twenty-first centuries conceptualizations of the public sphere. She is co-editor of the German Life and Letters Special Number 'The Politics and Poetics of Refusal: Towards a Theory of Primary Rejection' (2021). Her first monograph Stereotype and Destiny in Arthur Schnitzler’s Prose was published with Bloomsbury in 2018. 

Research interests and PhD supervision

• Cultural & Intellectual History of ‘Distance’ in the 20th & 21st century 
• Therapy Culture
• Viennese Modernism
• Psychoanalysis
• Sociology of Literature
• Feminist Ethics

Teaching

Marie has taught German language, German & comparative literature and culture from the eighteenth century to the present.

Expertise and public engagement

• Event with German writer Daniel Schreiber at Goethe-Institut London 
• Public facing writing on the cultural history of distance and Covid-19 in The Hedgehog Review and Solitudes: Past and Present
• Talk at ICI Berlin

Selected publications

• Kolkenbrock, M.: ‘The Ethos of Distance in Emotional Culture Critiques: Helmuth Plessner, Richard Sennett, Frank Furedi’, in New German Critique 149 (2023): 183-210.
• Kolkenbrock, M.: ‚Statt einer Biographie: Arthur Schnitzlers Haltung der Distanz‘, in Schnitzler Handbuch: Leben – Werk – Wirkung, ed. by Christoph Jürgensen, Wolfgang Lukas and Michael Scheffel (Metzler: Stuttgart 2022), 3-17.
• Kolkenbrock, M.: ‘Dora and her Sisters: Female Troublemakers and the Cultural Politics of Detachment’, in The Politics and Poetics of Refusal: Towards A Theory of Primary Rejection, ed. by A. Gehrlach and M. Kolkenbrock, a Special Number of German Life and Letters 74.1 (2021): 145-159.
• Kolkenbrock, M.: ‘Saved Face, Defended Place: Arthur Schnitzler and the Codes of Cool Conduct’, in Placing Schnitzler, ed. by Judith Beniston and Andrew Webber, Special Issue Austrian Studies 27 (2019), 13-28.
• Kolkenbrock, M.: Stereotype and Destiny in Arthur Schnitzler’s Prose: Five Psycho-Sociological Readings (New York, London: Bloomsbury, 2018) (= New Directions in German Studies).