Ellen Pilsworth

My work is concerned with nationalism, national identity, and expressions of these in literature and culture. I study examples from the 18th century to the present day, with a focus on Germany and the UK. I am fascinated by the ways that nations remember and respond to their violent pasts, and how historical conflicts continue to shape contemporary social discourses.

Areas of interest include representations of eighteenth-century political/military conflicts such as the German Seven Years' War and Napoleonic Period, and more recently, the legacies of the Second World War, Holocaust and Imperialism in Germany and Britain.

My current project, funded by the British Academy and Wolfson Foundation, explores anti-fascist texts made for British audiences by Austrian and German refugees from National Socialism. The project is entitled 'Knowing the Nazis, Inside and Out: Anti-Fascist Publishing in Austria, Germany and Britain, 1927-40.' This project combines approaches from memory studies, political history, and literary studies, and I blog about it here: https://ellenpilsworth.org/stating-the-obvious/.