Dr. Eleoma Bodammer (SFHEA)

Reader in German Studies

Biography

Background

Dr Bodammer completed her BA Hons in German Studies at the University of Manchester and continued at the University of Manchester, studying for a British Academy funded PhD, which was awarded in 2000. In 2001, she then took up her post as lecturer at the University of Edinburgh and was promoted to Senior Lecturer in 2012 and Reader in 2019. She was Head of German from 2013 to 2016.

Qualifications

BA Hons German Studies (University of Manchester)

PhD (University of Manchester)

Responsibilities & affiliations

Administrative Roles

  • Chair of Exams for German (from Jan 2019 to June 2021)
  • Course Organiser of the 4th year option course 'Goethe & Schiller'
  • Course Organiser of the 2nd year option course 'Researching Disability in Literature and Society'
  • Year 4 Convenor (from July 2020 to June 2021)
  • Course Organiser of the third year course German 3 Language (from July 2020 to June 2021)
  • Course Organiser of the fourth year course German Language Paper 1 (from July 2020 to June 2021)
  • Course Organiser of the fourth year course German Language Paper 2 (from Jan 2021 to June 2021)
  • Course Organiser of the fourth year course Oral for German (from July 2020 to June 2021)
  • Personal Tutor

Membership of trusts/boards

  • Member of the Editorial Board of The Edinburgh German Yearbook
  • Member of the Cross-Party Group on Germany in the Scottish Parliament
  • Member of the Editorial Board of the Peter Lang book series Disability, Media, Culture 

Membership of Societies/Networks

  • Women in German Studies (WIGS)
  • English Goethe Society (EGS)

  • Lessing Akademie

  • Association for German Studies in Great Britain and Ireland (AGS, formerly CUTG)

  • German Studies Association (GSA) (in 2019)

  • Scottish Disability Studies Network

  • Scottish Network for Nineteenth-Century European Cultures (SNNEC)

  • E. T. A. Hoffmann-Gesellschaft

Committee roles

  • LLC People and Equalities Committee member

  • LLC Steering Group on Decolonising the Curriculum

  • WIGS Diversity and Inclusion Committee member

  • AGS Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Committee member

 

External Examiner roles

2020-24 University of Manchester, BA Honours degrees with German

2021 Heriot-Watt University, PhD, Regina Schmid: ‘Et in Arcadia – mulier? Italienrepräsentationen deutschsprachiger Autorinnen des 18. bis 20. Jahrhunderts (textual constructions of Italy by German-speaking women writers between the late 18th and 20th century)

2013-18 University of Kent, BA Honours degrees with German

2013-15 University of Durham, Postgraduate MScs in Translation Studies

2012-13 University of Newcastle, MLitt thesis, Laura Jayne Winter: ‘Translating the Oral Tradition: Ballads in Eighteenth-century Britain and Germany’ 

 

 

Undergraduate teaching

Current Undergraduate Teaching:

  • First year German literature lectures on Goethe's early poetry
  • DELC Course: Crime and Detection in Literature (Hoffmann's Mademoiselle de Scudery)
  • Second year German course: Researching Disability in Literature and Society
  • German 4 Language Paper 1: fourth year - German Précis writing and German to English Translation
  • German 4 Language Paper 2: fourth year - German to English Literary Translation
  • Goethe and Schiller (third and fourth year literature option)
  • German 1B Language: first year written German language course 

Postgraduate teaching

MSc Translation Studies: Portfolio of Written Translation Exercises in German

MSc by Research in German 

Open to PhD supervision enquiries?

Yes

Areas of interest for supervision

Dr Bodammer is interested in supervising PhDs and MScs by Research on Goethe, E. T. A. Hoffmann, the German Sturm und Drang, German Romanticism, German travel writing (1750s to 1830s), disability in German literature (1750s to 1830s), and German translations of Scottish literature (esp. in 18th/19th centuries ).

Current PhD students supervised

Joint Supervisor for PhD student Karin Bosshard: Linguistic heterogeneity in Scottish novels in translation: Translating A Book of Death and Fish by Ian Stephen

Second Supervisor for PhD student Judith Drake: The Case of Disability Theatre in Contemporary Scotland

Second Supervisor for PhD student Cameron Cross: Corpora Arcana: Investigating the Supernatural-Body Paradigm in Selected Old French and Middle High German Literature

 

Past PhD students supervised

PhD

First Supervisor for Joanna Neilly, ‘The Image of the Orient in E. T. A. Hoffmann’s works’ (funded by the AHRC), awarded 2013

MSc by Research in German

First Supervisor for Cameron Cross, The Disabled Enabler: Leprosy, Impairment and Christian Miraculous Intervention in Hartmann von Aue's 'Der arme Heinrich' (funded by the Dr Georg Heuser Memorial Scholarship), awarded 2021

First Supervisor for Thomas Reid, 'Boredom in German Romanticism' (funded by the Dr Georg Heuser Memorial Scholarship), awarded 2016

Research summary

Eleoma Bodammer's (née Joshua) research interests are German literature in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with focuses on disability narratives in the German Romantic era, Anglo-German cultural relations, literary landscapes and literary translation. She has published a book on Friedrich Leopold Graf zu Stolberg (1750-1819) and the German Romantics. Other publications include journal articles and book chapters on Goethe, E. T. A. Hoffmann, Heinrich Heine, Friedrich Schiller and Robert Burns. She has also edited two volumes of the Edinburgh German Yearbook on the themes of cultural exchange and disability in German literature, theatre and film. She is currently the subject editor for German of Peter Lang's series Disability, Media, Culture: https://www.peterlang.com/series/7942 

 

Current research interests

Disability in the works of E. T. A. Hoffmann Anglo-German cultural and literary relations in the nineteenth century German literature in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries

Past research interests

• Thomas Carlyle’s life mask of Goethe • The reception of Robert Burns in Austria and German women translators of Burns's poems • The Brocken Inn poetry albums • Stolberg's and Schiller's 'Kassandra' odes • Representations of disability in E. T. A. Hoffmann's 'Klein Zaches, genannt Zinnober' • Literary journeys in the Harz Mountains 2006 Conference organiser and host of a two-day international conference on 'Cultural Exchange in German Literature' at the University of Edinburgh, supported by the University’s Development Trust (£1,500) and LLC (£500)

Knowledge exchange

Dr. Bodammer has given talks to non-specialists internationally, in Austria, Germany, Italy and Belgium, on dialect poetry and the reception of Robert Burns in Austria, German women translators of Burns, and on Friedrich Stolberg’s literary legacy and his conversion to Catholicism.

Affiliated research centres

Research activities

View all 18 activities on Research Explorer

Project activity

Dr. Bodammer is the co-research strand leader of  the DELC research strand "Cultural Encounters/Cultural Dialogues".

The aim of the strand is to interrogate the ways in which cultural encounters and cultural dialogues take place. It will study different modes of cultural and intercultural encounters; the interaction between cultural and linguistic phenomena; national canons; travel literature; translation, film adaptations and transposition of literary texts through performance; literature and the history of ideas; literature and visual arts; intertextuality; cultural identities and symbolic representations; interpretational forms through an international and cross-cultural perspective.

https://www.ed.ac.uk/literatures-languages-cultures/research/research-centres/research-strand-cultural-encounters-dialogues

 

Past project grants

Dr. Bodammer was awarded a highly prized AHRC research grant of £81,664 as principal and sole investigator of the research project “Scottish-German Cultural Exchange”. The research conducted full-time in the academic year 2011-12 uncovered the acquisition history of Thomas Carlyle’s Goethe Life Mask and examined the German-language reception of Robert Burns in Austria.

As principal investigator, she has held five Carnegie Trust Research grants worth £8,760 for research conducted between 2005 and 2011.
As principal investigator, she received a Moray Endowment Fund grant of £1,400 in 2011.
As co-investigator, she was awarded a British Academy Small Research Grant of £2,289.50 in 2007.
She received a grant of £1,500 from the University of Edinburgh's Development Trust grant in 2006 to cover the travel costs of conference delegates for the two day international conference that she hosted on Cultural Exchange in German Literature.

• Overall total for external grants to date: £93,584.86
• Overall total for internal grants to date: £8,861.03

View all 15 publications on Research Explorer

Conference details

2019 Paper: 'Disability in E. T. A. Hoffmann's "Des Vetters Eckfenster" (1822)', German Studies Association conference, Portland, Oregon, USA (Panel: Dis/ability in German-Language Culture) 

2019 Invited speaker: 'Teaching Disability'. Association of German Studies (AGS) Annual Conference, University of Bristol. Panel: Teaching Alterity. Roundtable panel.

2019 Invited paper: ‘Translating Religion: German Women Translators of Burns’s “The Cotter’s Saturday Night”’ at the Hyperion Symposium, UoE

2017 Paper: ‘German Women Translators of Robert Burns, 1802-1845’,  American Comparative Literature Association conference, Utrecht

2013 Paper:  ‘Biography as Cultural Transfer: Friedrich Stolberg’s Leben Alfred des Grossen (1815)’, Conference on King Alfred and Barbarossa in British and German literature, University of Nottingham

2012 Paper: ‘Thomas Carlyle’s Goethe Mask Revisited’, Carlyle Conference, University of Edinburgh

2012 Paper: 'The Reception of Robert Burns in the Austrian Empire’, Association for German Studies Conference, University of Edinburgh

2011 Paper:  ‘German Romantic Freakery and Literary Teratology in Jean Paul’s Dr. Katzenbergers Badereise’, Association for German Studies Conference, Queen Mary, University of London

2011 Paper: ‘Romantics Reading Romantics Transnationally: Representations of the Harz Landscape,’ American Comparative Literature Association Conference, Vancouver

2010 Paper:  ‘Misreading the Body: E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Klein Zaches, genannt Zinnober’, at the Association for German Studies Conference, University of Reading

 

 

Invited speaker

2022 Seminar series: Disability in E. T. A. Hoffmann's "Des Vetters Eckfenster", King's College, University of London

2019 Inspiring Speaker Paper: 'Dis/abling the Curriculum in Higher Education: Putting Disability on the Reading List', Student Success, Equality, Diversity and Inclusivity Project, University of Kent

2019 Panel discussion: 'Giving and Responding to feedback' at the DELC Teaching Forum, University of Edinburgh

2019: Invited paper: ‘Dehumanizing via Translation: Widtmann’s German translation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1912)’, Translation Studies Research Seminar, University of Edinburgh

2017 Lecture: The Ringvorlesung series “Mainz meets Scotland”: Lecture title: ‘Oatmeal and Calvinism: 19th century German Translations of Robert Burns’s ‘The Cotter’s Saturday Night’, University of Mainz, Germany

2016 Paper: ‘German Women Translators of Robert Burns’, IASH, University of Edinburgh

2014 Paper: ‘German Women Translators of Robert Burns: Gender in Retranslation’, University of Newcastle

2012 Lecture: ‘Writing on the Brocken, on the Brocken: The Poetry of the Brocken Visitor’s Books’, at the English Goethe Society in the Institute of Germanic and Romance Studies, London

2012 Paper: ‘Thomas Carlyle’s Goethe Mask, Revisited’, German Research Seminar, University of Edinburgh

2012 Workshop for Postgraduates at the University of Edinburgh, DAAD Summer School

2009 Paper:  ‘E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Klein Zaches genannt Zinnober’, German Department Research Seminar, University of St Andrews

2008 Paper: ‘E.T.A Hoffmann’s Optical Motifs’, German Research Seminar, University of Edinburgh

2006 Paper: ‘Cultural Exchange in the Travel Writing of Friedrich Stolberg’, Conference on Cultural Exchange in German Literature, University of Edinburgh

2005 Workshop on “Teaching Languages” at the DAAD German Language Assistants conference in London

2004 Paper: ‘The Harz Mountains in late Eighteenth-Century Poetry’, German Department research seminar, University of Edinburgh

Organiser

2006: Organiser of an international two day conference on Cultural Exchange in German Literature, at the University of Edinburgh

 

Participant

2006-08 Panel chair: Conference for University Teachers of German – 19th century German Studies

More video

In the press

Senior Leadership Programme for Women of Colour 2021

https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/iad4researchers/moving-ahead-with-your-research/supporting-researchers/

Wales Literature Exchange, Wales PEN Cymru and Literature Across Frontiers Translation Challenge 2020: Adjudication and Poems

http://walespencymru.org/translation-challenge-2020-adjudication/

https://poetrywales.co.uk/poetry-wales-presents-translation-challenge-2020s-winning-translation/ 

http://walespencymru.org/winners-2020/

Teaching Matters Blog: Addressing exclusion and underrepresentation in boundary-pushing course design, 2020

https://www.teaching-matters-blog.ed.ac.uk/mini-series-addressing-exclusion-and-underrepresentation-through-boundary-pushing-course-design/

Expanding German Studies Blog on the AGS Roundtable Panel on 'Teaching Alterity' in 2019

https://germanstudiesbibliography.wordpress.com/category/blog/

Expanding German Studies 2018

https://germanstudiesbibliography.wordpress.com/2018/08/23/expanding-the-curriculum-in-nineteenth-century-german-studies/

EUSA Teaching Awards 2018

https://www.eusa.ed.ac.uk/representation/campaigns/teachingawards/shortlist2018/

"Mainz meets Scotland" - Ringvorlesung 2017

https://www.schottland.uni-mainz.de/ringvorlesung-mainz-meets-scotland/

The Reception of Robert Burns in Europe

https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/the-reception-of-robert-burns-in-europe-9781441170316/

Thomas Carlyle's Goethe Life Mask

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1468-0483.2012.01573.x

Disability in German Literature, Theater and Film

https://boydellandbrewer.com/edinburgh-german-yearbook-4-hb.html

Cultural Exchange in German Literature

https://boydellandbrewer.com/edinburgh-german-yearbook-1-hb.html

Harzreisen/Harz Journeys

https://www.lehmanns.de/shop/geisteswissenschaften/8347020-9783895346804-literarische-harzreisen

Friedrich Leopold Graf zu Stolberg and the German Romantics

http://www.worldcat.org/title/friedrich-leopold-graf-zu-stolberg-and-the-german-romantics/oclc/186579362

https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=12777

 

 

 

 

 

 

Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, 2021 (Edinburgh Teaching Award)

Senior Leadership Programme for Women of Colour (Institute for Academic Development/ Edinburgh Race Equality Network), a Scottish Funding Council-supported leadership programme, University of Edinburgh, 2021

 

Winner of the Wales Pen Cymru Translation Challenge, 2020

The challenge was to translate a series of short poems titled ‘Nahaufnahmen’ by Turkish poet, Zafer Şenocak, from German into English. 

http://walespencymru.org/winners-2020/ 

 

Winner of the EUSA Teaching Award in the Best Assessment Feedback category, 2018

https://media.ed.ac.uk/media/Eleoma+Bodammer+Awards/1_1xp8d5bb

 

AHRC Research Fellowship, 2011-12, a competitve award of a grant of £81,664.00 to research cultural exchange between Scotland and Germany in the nineteenth century,

specifically on the reception of Robert Burns in Austria, the history of Thomas Carlyle's Goethe Life Mask, and foundational research on the German women translators of Robert Burns. 

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