Our Project Members
We have members in our project from Universities in the UK, Ireland, Austria and Germany.
Michaela Schrage-Früh
Dr. Michaela Schrage-Früh is Associate Professor in German and Director of the Centre for European Studies at the University of Limerick, Ireland. Her research interests include German and comparative literature, cultural ageing studies, and cultural dream studies. She is the author of Philosophy, Dreaming and the Literary Imagination (Palgrave, 2016) and co-editor, with Hannah Ahlheim, of the forthcoming Bloomsbury Cultural History of Sleep and Dreaming, volume 5: The Modern Age, 1860-1945).
She has published widely on gender and ageing in literature and culture, including several co-edited collections, such as, with Cathy McGlynn and Margaret O’Neill, Ageing Women in Literature and Visual Culture: Reflections, Refractions, Reimaginings (Palgrave, 2017), with Tony Tracy, Ageing Masculinities in Contemporary European and Anglophone Cinema (Routledge, 2023) and, with Éilίs Nί Dhuibhne, Well, You Don’t Look It: Women Writers in Ireland Reflect on Ageing (Salmon, 2024).
She was Principal Investigator of the IRC-funded project ‘Restorying Ageing: Older Women and Life Writing” (2021-2022) and is currently Principal Investigator of the DAAD-funded project “European Societal Challenges in German Culture: Exploring Ageing and Climate Change in Tandem” (2025-2026). She is Co-Chair of the German Studies Association of Ireland (GSAI) and an advisory board member of the European Network of Aging Studies (ENAS).
Tina-Karen Pusse
Tina-Karen Pusse was Head of the School of Languages, Literatures and Cultures at University of Galway 2020-2024, serves on the Board of the German Studies in Ireland Association, is Co-Editor of the Periodical Germanistik in Ireland, Co-Chair of University of Galway`s International Staff Network, alumna and evaluator of the German National Merit Foundation, Secretary of the Royal Irish Academy committee Language, Literature, Culture and Communication, and the Galway Delegate of the SDG-Arts/all Ireland group.
She studied German Literature and Philosophy at Albert-Ludwigs University Freiburg and Paris VIII (MA 2000), and was awarded her Dr phil from Cologne University in 2004. Before joining University of Galway in 2008, she was teaching German Literature and Media Theory at Cologne University. After publishing in the area of laughter theory, autofiction, gender studies and early 20th century poetry, she developed a specialism in Environmental Humanities, where she publishes and hosts conferences and postgraduate summer schools since 2011. Recent publications focus on the anthropocentrism/ecocentrism divide, representations of the ecological uncanny, prepping cultures, the metabolism of cities, and the interface of aging and climate change studies. With her current project: Ecologies of Scale: Art, Economy, Community, she is a research delegate of the ENLIGHT European University Alliance.
Jeannine Baetz
Jeannine Hélène Baetz is a PhD candidate in International Cultural Studies at the University of Galway. Drawing on her academic background in Slavic studies, comparative literary studies, and intermediality studies, her current research project focusses on the representation of environmental crises and haunting presences in contemporary European crime fiction. Her research interests include genre fiction’s interfacing with socio-political issues and intermedial approaches to contemporary European literature and television.
Caitríona Ní Dhúill
Caitríona Ní Dhúill is professor of modern German literature at the University of Salzburg. Her publications include the monographs Metabiography: Reflecting on Biography (Palgrave 2020) and Sex in Imagined Spaces: Gender and Utopia from More to Bloch (Legenda 2010), as well as the edited collections Anthropocene Austria (with Nicola Thomas, 2022) and Precarious Life and Determined Letters (with Tina-Karen Pusse and Hanna Bingel, forthcoming 2025).
Her research focusses on the relationships between literature and ecological consciousness. She studied Music and German at Trinity College Dublin, graduating with a PhD in Germanic Studies in 2005. She has worked at the universities of St Andrews, Vienna and Durham, and was professor in German at University College Cork from 2020 to 2023. She currently co-directs the Salzburg consortium Arts and Knowledges / Wissenschaft und Kunst.
Daniela Dora
Daniela Dora is currently Director of Studies in Modern Languages at Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge, and an Affiliated Lecturer in German Studies at the Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages and Linguistics, University of Cambridge. Prior to joining Lucy Cavendish College, she served as DAAD Lecturer in German at Gonville & Caius College and Trinity College, Cambridge. From 2016-2017 she was Tutor in German at King’s College London. Before moving to the UK, she held academic positions at Ghent University in Belgium and the University of Luxembourg, and has also researched and taught German language and literature at higher education institutions across the Netherlands, India, South Korea, and Mexico.
Anne Fuchs
Anne Fuchs is Full Professor and Director of the UCD Humanities Institute. Prior to her current post she held the Chairs of German at the universities of Warwick and St Andrews. Her scholarship on German cultural memory; time and temporality; modernist and contemporary literature as evident in 6 monographs, 16 co-edited volumes/special issues, numerous book chapters and journal articles has paved original directions in interdisciplinary research areas. Recent publications: Precarious Times. Temporality and History in Modern German Culture (Cornell UP, 2019; pp. 322); The Politics and Aesthetics of Relationality in Contemporary German, Literature, Culture, and Film, eds. Mary Cosgrove and Anne Fuchs. Oxford German Studies 53/1 and 53/3 (2024 OA); Framing Ageing: Interdisciplinary Perspectives for Humanities and Social Science Research, eds. Julia Langbein, Mary Cosgrove and Anne Fuchs (Bloomsbury, 2024; OA).
Fuchs has received major competitive funding, spanning PRTLI, IRCHSS, Wellcome Trust, Andrew Mellon Foundation and the German Research Council. She has held guest professorships and research fellowships at the École Normale Supérieure, Nottingham University, the universities of Konstanz and Bonn. From 2023-2024 she was PI of the CHCI transnational research project, funded by the Mellon Foundation, ‘Post-extractivist legacies and landscapes: Humanities, artistic and activist responses’ in collaboration with the universities of Tallinn, the University of Witwatersrand, the National University of Australia and Rice University (see Link). Committed to the public humanities, the project resulted in commissioned art works by the project artist Judy Carroll-Deeley, podcasts, video recordings, and the art exhibition Landings: Art after Extractivism. Currently Fuchs is PI of the interdisciplinary project From Modern Crisis to Permacrisis in collaboration with the universities of Tallinn, Adam Mickiewicz Poznań; Paris Lodron Salzburg, Stavanger and the NGO Fighting Words (Dublin); The Museum of Literature Ireland (Dublin), and the Arsenal Municipal Gallery, (Poznań). (see https://www.ucd.ie/humanities/research/frommoderncrisistopermacrisisandpolycrisis/). She is a Fellow of the British Academy and a member of the Royal Irish Academy. In 2025 she received the Royal Irish Academy Gold Medal in the Humanities.
Katharina Fürholzer
Katharina Fürholzer is a Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies at the Institute of German Language and Literatures, University of Koblenz, Germany. She holds a Joint Ph.D. in Literary Studies from the Universities of Münster and Ghent and has conducted postdoctoral research in the History, Theory, and Ethics of Medicine (University of Ulm), Comparative Literature (University of Pennsylvania), and Ageing Studies (University of Rostock). Her research focuses on Medical Humanities, Literary Aging Studies, as well as Ethics and Aesthetics.
Miriam Haller
Dr.in phil. Miriam Haller ist kulturwissenschaftliche Alterns-, Literatur- und Bildungswissenschaftlerin. Nach fast zwei Jahrzehnten in der Geschäftsführung und Leitung des Gasthörer- und Seniorenstudiums sowie des Center for Aging Studies (CEfAS) der Universität zu Köln, verantwortet sie seit 2019 den Bereich Forschung am Kompetenzzentrum für Kulturelle Bildung im Alter und inklusive Kultur (www.kubia.nrw ) in Köln, das vom Ministerium für Kultur und Wissenschaft des Landes Nordrhein-Westfalen institutionell gefördert wird. Im Fokus ihrer Forschung steht die diskursive Performativität ebenso wie die konkreten Performanzen von „Ageing Trouble“ (Haller 2005/2020). Dabei analysiert sie nicht nur die Topik von Un/doing Age und Un/doing Generations im wissenschaftlichen und literarischen Diskurs, sondern widmet sich insbesondere auch der Praxis Kultureller Bildung im Alter: Wie wird in der kulturgeragogischen Praxis „Ageing Trouble“ oder „Generation Trouble“ gemacht?
Im Kontext des DAAD-Projekts Ageing and Ecocriticism interessiert sie die Theorieentwicklung und literarische Textpraxis zum Themenfeld Alter(n) und Ecocriticism, aber auch die diesbezüglichen Kulturellen und Literarischen Bildungsangebote: Wie werden Alters- und Generationenambivalenzen im Anthropozän, dem Zeitalter der menschgemachten ökologischen Krisen, in Projekten Intergenerationeller Kultureller Bildung verhandelt? Wie können kultur- und literaturgeragogische Projekte ein „Unruhig bleiben“/„Staying with the Trouble“ (Haraway 2016) unterstützen?
Marieke Krajenbrink
Marieke Krajenbrink is Associate Professor in German at the University of Limerick, Ireland, where she led the MA in Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies 2004-2020. She studied German and Theatre Studies at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam and has published widely on German and Austrian literature. Her research focusses on intertextuality and intermediality, memory studies and questions of identity both in German-language literature of the 20th and 21st centuries and from a comparative perspective. More recently, she has published on literary representations of landscape, memory and identity. Additional key research interests include Austrian and international crime literature, German Romanticism and the reception of Richard Wagner, and German-Irish and Dutch-Irish literary relations. She is co-founder of the International Crime Genre Research Network and the Comparative Literature Association of Ireland (CLAI) and member of the Centre for Irish-German Studies at the University of Limerick.
Her book publications include Intertextualität als Konstruktionsprinzip. Transformationen des Kriminalromans und des romantischen Romans bei Peter Handke und Botho Strauß (1996), Beziehungen und Identitäten. Österreich, Irland und die Schweiz (2004, edited with Gisela Holfter and Edward Moxon-Browne) and Investigating Identities. Questions of Identity in International Crime Fiction (2009, edited with Kate Quinn).
Ulla Kriebernegg
Ulla Kriebernegg is the Director of the Center for Interdisciplinary Research on Aging and Care (CIRAC) and a Full Professor of Cultural Aging and Care Studies at the University of Graz, as well as an Adjunct Professor at the Medical University of Graz. Trained in American Studies and German literature, her research now centers on Age Studies and the Health & Medical Humanities.
She is the co-editor of Care Home Stories (2017) and Aging Studies and Ecocriticism: Interdisciplinary Encounters (2023) and a founding member and former president of the European Network of Aging Studies (ENAS). She also serves as Associate Editor of The Gerontologist and is a Fellow of the Trent Centre for Aging & Society (Canada), the AgeCap Center at the University of Gothenburg (Sweden), and the Gerontological Society of America, where she is also a member of the Board of Directors.
A dedicated scholar and educator, Ulla has led numerous research projects, taught internationally—including in Canada, Croatia, Cuba, Trinidad & Tobago, Uruguay, and the USA—and has been recognized with multiple awards for her teaching and research.
Clarisa Novello
Coming Soon!
Paula Riese
Paula Riese is a PhD candidate at the University of Limerick in the program “Languages, Literature, Culture and Communications” under the supervision of Dr Michaela Schrage-Früh. For the academic year 2024/25 she was a DAAD Teaching Assistant at the University of Limerick and the Centre for Irish-German Studies in Limerick. With a Joint-Master’s degree in “Intercultural German Studies” issued by the University of Mannheim and University of Waterloo, she has a deep passion for German literature and culture.
Her research focuses on Women in Literature, exploring Trauma and Healing in Irish and German novels about Motherhood for her dissertation. Other research interests are Cultural Memory Studies, or in German “Vergangenheitsbewältigung” (coming to terms with the past) and dystopian literature. Additionally she has a background in corporate communications, working as a freelancer during her Masters.
Katie Ritson
Katie Ritson is a scholar of comparative literature and environmental humanities with a particular interest in Northern Europe. She is assistant professor in the Institute for Scandinavian Studies and affiliated researcher at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment & Society at LMU Munich. Katie was Co-PI of the project “Corridor Talk: Conservation Humanities and the Future of Europe’s National Parks” and has written on the literary imagination of the North Sea coasts, and particularly the Wadden Sea. Her current research is on literary and cultural narration of the offshore oil industry in the North Sea. She is a coordinator of the European Conservation Humanities Network and a member of the Netzwerk Energie und Literatur, both funded by the German Research Council.
Madeleine Schmitz
Madeleine (they/them) holds dual bachelor’s degrees in Philosophy and English, alongside a master’s degree in Philosophy, all earned from Johns Hopkins University. Their specialties include 19th – early 20th century women German philosophers, consciousness, ecofeminism, and social metaphysics. They are currently translating Lou Andreas-Salomé’s Ma; Ein Porträt, while working on a longer project formalizing Salomé’s philosophy on gender and freedom.
Madeleine has spent the last few years teaching the humanities and college preparatory courses. They just wrapped up teaching English and History to 7th and 11th graders at a private school in Maryland.
Linda Shortt
Linda Shortt is lecturer at Maynooth University. Her research and teaching interests include German-language cultural representations of belonging, migration, memory, border and care studies and the health humanities. To date, her work on ageing has concentrated on cultural representations of ageing and illness, ideas of ageing well and care. See, for example: “The art of ageing: Finitude, vulnerability and opportunity in Hermann Kinder’s The Way of all Flesh” in Julia Langbein, Mary Cosgrove and Anne Fuchs (eds), Framing Ageing: Interdisciplinary Perspectives for Humanities and Social Sciences Research (London: Bloomsbury, 2024), pp. 39-52.
