Peter Arnds

Biography

Dr. Peter Arnds, Associate Professor and Fellow, is the Director of the MPhil in Comparative Literature and the MPhil in Literary Translation, and teaches in the German and Italian departments. He was Visiting Professor at Middlebury College, the University of Kabul, JNU Delhi, and the J.M. Coetzee Centre for Creative Practice at the University of Adelaide. He is the author of Intertextuality in Wilhelm Raabe and Charles Dickens (Peter Lang, 1997), Representation, Subversion and Eugenics in Günter Grasss The Tin Drum (Camden House 2004), and Lycanthropy in German Literature (Palgrave Macmillan 2015), has edited Translating Holocaust Literature (Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2015), and translated Patrick Boltshausers novel Stromschnellen (Rapids, Dalkey Archive Press, 2014, nominated for the Dublin International Literary Award). A member of the PEN Centre he has published prose and poetry in literary journals around the globe, and was a writer-in-residence at the Heinrich Böll Cottage on Achill Island (Mayo). His collection of poetry A Rare Clear Day appeared in RedFox Press in 2015.

Research Interest

Dr. Peter Arnds is an internationally recognized expert in Comparative Literature and post-1945 German literature, particularly the works of Nobel Laureate Günter Grass and questions of representation of the Third Reich in literature, culture, and translation. His 2015 monograph, Lycanthropy in German Literature (Palgrave Macmillan) is an interdisciplinary project at the interstices of literature, philosophy, psychology, and anthropology and includes literary texts from Icelandic saga through the picaresque genre, romanticism, and realism, to the twentieth century. Arnds recently co-authored a Jean Monnet Network Grant application on the topic of Myth and Migration, Diaspora and Nationalism. Working together with Professor Jennifer Rutherford, the Director of the J.M. Coetzee Centre for Creative Practice at the University of Adelaide, this funding is being sought for the creation of a new international research network between Trinity, the University of Adelaide, Universidad de Complutense, Madrid and the Centre for Myth Studies at the University of Essex. Arnds is currently working on his fourth academic monograph, The Cultural Politics of a Predator: Wolves, Literature, and the Metaphorics of Migration, an analysis of the uses of mythological structures in representations of genocide and coming to terms with trauma.