Goldsmiths - University of London

Dr Rick Crownshaw

BA (Hons) English and American Studies (Keele University, 1993); MA in Post-1945 American Literature and Literary Theory (University of Sussex, 1994); DPhil in American Literature (University of Sussex, 2000); Lecturer in American Literature, Keele University, 2000-2001; Lecturer in English, Manchester Metropolitan University, 2001-2005; appointed by Goldsmiths College 2005.

Teaching

At undergraduate level, I teach Inventing the Nation: American Literature in the Mid-Nineteenth Century, Introduction to American Literature and Culture, The American South, and Modern American Fiction. I offer the following MA courses:  Twenty-first Century American Fiction, and American Literature and Culture: Critical and Theoretical Concepts.

Administrative roles
I am member of the Department’s Curriculum and Planning Committee; I was Admissions Tutor for the Department from 2006-9, for the BA programme in English and American Literature, 2005-6, 2009-10; I am Departmental Exams Officer, 2010-; I am the BA English and American Literature Programme Coordinator; and Admissions Tutor and Programme Coordinator for the Pathway in American Literature and Culture, MA in Comparative Literary Studies

Areas of supervision

I currently supervise theses on nineteenth-, twentieth- and twenty-first-century American literature and culture, and on Holocaust memorialisation. I am keen to supervise further projects on Holocaust representation and memory, American cultural trauma and memory, and American literature from the nineteenth century to the present day. 

Presentations and exhibitions

Recent conference organization: Transcultural Memory

A conference jointly organized by the Department of English and Comparative Literature, Goldsmiths, University of London, and The Centre for the Study of Cultural Memory, Institute of Germanic & Romance Studies, University of London. (This conference marked the inauguration of The Centre for the Study of Cultural Memory.)
Conference website

Grants & awards

May - July 2004, Arts and Humanities Research Council Research Leave for the project 'Reconsidering Postmemory: Post-Holocaust Remembrance in Theory, Literature, Art and Architecture.'

Professional activities

• Member of the Academic Committee, Institute of Germanic and Romance Studies, University of London
• Member of editorial board, Memory and Narrative Series, Transaction Press (Rutgers University) 
• Member of the editorial board for the journal Memory Studies (published by Sage)
• Member of the Peer Review Committee of the Institute of Germanic & Romance Studies Publications Series, University of London
• Lecturer and Convenor, MA in Cultural Memory, Institute of Germanic and Romance Studies, University of London
• Co-organiser, Cultural Memory Seminar Series (Institute of Germanic and Romance Studies and Raphael Samuel Centre, University of East London).

Research interests

Nineteenth-century American literature; post-1945 and twenty-first century American fiction; American cultural memory and trauma; representations of the Holocaust, particularly American, German and British, in literature, photography, museums, memorials and monuments. I am currently engaged in the following monograph-length research projects: the relationship between nineteenth- and twenty-first century American fiction; American literature and transcultural and transnational memory.

Selected publications

Forthcoming / Commissioned

• 'The American Uncanny in American Studies and American Fiction after 9/11', Journal of American Studies, special issue on 9/11 (2011)
• Contributing guest editor, special edition of Parallax on 'transcultural memory', 61 (2011)
• Contributing editor, with Albert Lichtblau, Representing the Holocaust in an Age of Globalisation (Transaction Press)

Published

• The Afterlife of Holocaust Memory in Literature and Culture (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010)
• with Jane Kilby and Antony Rowland (eds), The Future of Memory (Oxford and New York: Berghahn Books, 2010)
• 'Introduction: The Future of Memory', in Richard Crownshaw, Jane Kilby, Antony Rowland (eds), The Future of Memory (Oxford and New York, Berghahn, 2010).
• 'Reading the Text as Witness in the Work of W. G. Sebald', Journal of Romance Studies, 9.3 (2009) (Special Issue on Cultural Memory)
• 'The Limits of Transference: Theories of Memory and Photography in W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz', in Ann Rigney and Astrid Erll (eds), Mediation, Remediation, and the Dynamics of Cultural Memory (Berlin and New York: de Gruyter, 2009)
• 'Rereading Der Vorleser: Remembering the Perpetrator', in Stuart Taberner and Karina Berger (eds), 'Germans as Victims' in The Literary Fiction of the Berlin Republic (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2009)
• 'The German Countermonument: Conceptual Indeterminacies and the Retheorisation of the Arts of Vicarious Memory', Forum for Modern Language Studies (Oxford University Press), 44.2 (April 2008), 212-227.
• 'Photography and Memory in Holocaust Museums', Mortality (Routledge), special edition on Mourning, Memory, Memoria and Commemoration, 12.2 (April 2007), 176-192.
• 'German suffering or "narrative fetishism?":  W. G. Sebald's Luftkrieg und Literatur', in Lise Patt (ed.), Searching for Sebald (Los Angeles: Institute for Cultural Inquiry, 2007)
• 'Reconsidering Postmemory: Photography, the Archive and Post-Holocaust Memory in W.G. Sebald's Austerlitz', Mosaic (Special issue on the Photograph), 37.4, (December 2004), 215-236.
• 'Performing Memory in Holocaust Museums', Performance Research (Routledge), 5.3 (2000), 18-27.
• 'Cultural Heritage and Ethnic Identity: Belsen in the Museum', in Jane Stokes and Anna Reading (eds.), Developments in British Media (London: Macmillan, 1999), 295-303.