German staff
Outline Biography
Appointed Lecturer in German at Edinburgh in 1973 and Professor of Austrian Studies in 1997, I retired 2010. Visiting Professor of German at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut in 1988 and since 2003 Senior Research Fellow in Austrian Literature and Culture at the Institute of Germanic and Romance Studies, part of the University of London’s Institute for Advanced Studies. Since its inception I have been on the advisory board of the journal Austrian Studies (Edinburgh University Press), 1989-1999, and its successor Austrian Studies, New Series (MHRA), 2001-. I am also a member of the advisory board of the Ingeborg Bachmann Centre for Austrian Literature (IGRS, University of London).
Research Interests
My research centres on late 19th- and 20th-century Austrian literature/culture and often involves the work of Jewish artists and thinkers. My books on the Viennese writer Peter Altenberg (1859-1919), frequently written in collaboration with Leo A. Lensing (Wesleyan University), reassemble and redefine a civilization fractured by the collapse of the Habsburgs and the devastation wrought by anti-Semitism and National Socialism. This involves looking beyond a single figure to explore the interface of literature and society, literature and philosophy, the visual arts and photography, architecture and music.
The socio-political aspects of Austrian culture during the twenty years between the end of the Habsburg empire (1918) and the Hitlerian Anschluss (1938) are at the heart of my next monograph, A Cold Sun. Literary Reflections of the First Austrian Republic (2012). This study is the first in English to examine in any depth the literary culture of the First Austrian Republic.
Research activity
PhD Supervision
I am happy to discuss supervision of topics relating to Austrian literature and culture in the 19th and 20th centuries; music and literature. I am currently supervising theses on music and identity in Germany and Austria post 1945 and cultural memorials in the First Austrian Republic.
Publications
Publications list for Andrew Barker
Teaching
This article was published on Oct 30, 2012