Sarah Sosinski

Sarah Sosinski completed her Bachelor's degree in German, English and American Studies at the University of Augsburg and graduated in 2020 with a thesis on the ‘Kleiderstrophen’ in the Niebelungenlied. She then completed her Master's degree in German Studies (2022) and International Literature (2023), also in Augsburg. In the academic year 2023/2024, she held a Doctoral Fellowship at the Franz Rosenzweig Minerva Research Centre of the Hebrew University (Jerusalem) and worked at the Rosenzweig Center on the ‘German-Jewish Quotidian’. Her research focuses on 20th & 21st century German-Jewish literature, modernist literature around 1900, Prague-German literature, postcolonial literature, intersectionality and cultural studies in contemporary literature. Since April 2024 she has been a research assistant in the research training group ‘Family Matters’.

Dissertation project: The Intergenerational Project of Emancipation(s) in German Jewish Family Novels between 1871 and 1918

The dissertation project examines Jewish family and generational novels in German-language Jewish literature in the period between the legal equality of Jews in Germany in 1871 and the beginning of the First World War. Using the means of literary realism, they tell stories of everyday Jewish life from all social classes. In the ‘natural’ succession of generations, they present stories of progress that perpetuate the central idea of Jewish emancipation, which characterized the entire 19th century, or demonstrate its failure and show new paths for Jewish life in the 20th century.
The project supplements the general genre definition of the family and generational novel with the ‘blind spot’ of the Jewish novel. The ideas of family as the ‘nucleus’ of a conception of community - religious, national, gender, etc. - to be analyzed more closely in each individual case will be examined in their complex interrelationships. More recent approaches in literary intersectionality research make it possible to grasp the different concepts of emancipation in Jewish family and generational novels more precisely on a narrative and thematic level and to analyze them at the interface between literary, cultural and social studies. With its ‘realistic’ descriptions of growing up, schooling, first love, but also the everyday experience of war and anti-Semitism, with its inscription in socio-political debates and the question of the concrete self-positioning of its protagonists in their family communities, the families in turn in their differently defined contexts, the family and generational novel diagnoses the (failed) emancipation and assimilation of Jews between 1871 and 1918 and calls for social and cultural progress.

Scholarships and Grants

• Doctoral Fellowship 2023/24 of the Franz-Rosenzweig-Minerva Research Centre, Hebrew University of Jerusalem
• DAAD research fellowship for doctoral students 2023/2024
• Exposé scholarship from the University of Augsburg's gender equity program 2023

Memberships

• German Society for General and Comparative Literature (DGAVL)
• Society for Exile Research e. V.
• Bukovina Institute Augsburg e. V.
• Leo Baeck Institute Jerusalem for the Study of German-Jewish History and Culture
• Women in Literary Studies e. V. (FrideL)

Talks

• ‘The Struggle Between Tradition and Modernity - Literary Dialectics of Belonging in Olha Kobyljanska's Oeuvre’ (2nd International Interdisciplinary Conference on the History and Culture of Bukovina for Early Career Researchers, Bukovina Institute, University of Augsburg, 20-22 November 2024)
• ‘Intersectionality of Jewish and Women's Emancipation at the Example of the German-Jewish Family Novel around 1900’ (Europaeum Summer School, University of St. Andrews, August 2024)
• ‘‘Das Amt der Frau’ - Sozialkritik und Pazifismus im journalistischen Werk Auguste Hauschners zwischen 1914-1918’ (International Conference on the 100th Anniversary of Auguste Hauschner's Death, University of Augsburg, April 2024)
• ‘‘Family Affairs’ and the ‘Everyday’ in Ulla Wolff-Frankfurter's Family Novel ‘The Patriarch’ (1903)’ (Colloquium at the Franz Rosenzweig Minerva Research Centre, February 2024)

Teaching

• Winter Term 24/25 PS Narrating Jewish Family from 1900 until Today (University of Augsburg)
• Summer Term 24: Basic Course in Modern German Literature (University of Augsburg)
• Summer Term 23: PS Family Novels around 1900 (University of Augsburg)
• Winter Term 22/23: Basic Course in Modern German Literature (University of Augsburg)
• Winter Term 22/23: PS/HS Kafka's Heiresses (University of Augsburg)
• Summer Term 22: PS ‘Beschwertes Schreiben’ - Contemporary German-Jewish Literature (University of Augsburg)
• Summer Term 22: ÜB/AG Benefit event: Reading of literature from Czernowitz (Ukraine) in the Kresslesmühle Augsburg
• Winter Term 20/21: Workshop on the genre of the novella (University of Chernivtsi)