The Sentimental: Research and Teaching

The Sentimental: Research and Teaching

Current Dissertations

  • Vanessa Hardinger, “‘Heartache Horror’: Home, Family, and Generational Trauma in the Sentimental Horror of Mike Flanagan’s Television Series“
  • Charleena Schweda, “‘Hell Is a Teenage Girl:’ The Sentimental in Anglophone Female Coming-of-Age Monster Films of the Early 21st Century”
  • Sarah Ronja Steiner, “Silent Tears and Steady Thrones: Navigating Change Through Sentimental Narratives of Family, Identity, and Duty in the British Period Dramas The Crown and Downton Abbey”

Publications

  • “Sentimental States of the Nation: Remembering Diana, Princess of Wales (and Shakespeare’s Richard II)”, in: Heike Paul und Sarah Miriam Pritz (ed.): Sentimental State(s): Affective Politics of Order and Belonging. Bielefeld: transcript, 2025 (Global Sentimentality, Vol. 3), 163-194  [open access; published 12 August 2025].
  • “Westworld and Humans: The Sentimental Disposition of Popular Posthumanism”, in: Journal of Posthumanism, vol. 4, no. 2, Sept. 2024 (Dossier: Posthuman Encounters – Desires, Fears, and the Uncanny), 71-78, doi:10.33182/joph.v4i2.3339. [Erschienen 10. September 2024, Peer-reviewed, open access: (1) or (2)]
  • Sam Mendes: Skyfall. München: edition text + kritik 2024. [erschienen 1. September 2024]
  • “Zur filmischen Repräsentation britischer Arbeiterklassen, c. 1960-2000: Heroisches, Sentimentales – und Männliches”, in: Victoria Gutsche, Ronja Holzinger, Larissa Pfaller und Melissa Sarikaya (ed.): Distinktion, Ausgrenzung und Mobilität. Interdisziplinäre Perspektiven auf soziale Ungleichheit (Erlangen: FAU University Press, 2022), 195-219 (FAU Studien Gender Differenz Diversität, Vol. 2). Open access. DOI: 10.25593/978-3-96147-554-4. [mit Doris Feldmann]
  • “Basil Dearden’s Violent Playground (1958): Masculinity, Class, and Sentimental Politics”, in: Carmen Dexl, Silvia Gerlsbeck (ed.): The Male Body in Representation: Returning to Matter (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022), 75-95 (Palgrave Studies in (Re)Presenting Gender) ISBN: 978-3-030-88603-5. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-88604-2_4
  • “Violent Playground (1958)” in: Heike Paul, Sarah Marak, Katharina Gerund, Marius Henderson (ed.): Lexicon of Global Melodrama (Bielefeld: transcript, 2022), 107-110 (Global Sentimentality, Vol. 1). Open access. DOI: 10.1515/9783839459737.
  • “The Night of the Hunter (1955)”, in: Heike Paul, Sarah Marak, Katharina Gerund, Marius Henderson (ed.): Lexicon of Global Melodrama (Bielefeld: transcript, 2022), 95-98 (Global Sentimentality, Vol. 1). Open access. DOI: 10.1515/9783839459737.

Lectures/Papers (Selections)

  • “Das Fußballstadion als sentimentaler Raum: Eröffnung der Tagung ‚Football Sentimentality‘” (Sportpark Ronhof / SpVgg Greuther Fürth, 10.02.2025) [online: Activities & Publications]
  • “Affektive Displays: Zur (sentimentalen) Politik des Zeigens” (Akademie der Bildenden Künste, München, 7. November 2024; Vortrag/Workshop)
  • “Feeling Blue: Digital Nostalgia in Skyfall (2012)” (Universität des Saarlandes, Saarbrücken, 19.12.2023)
  • “The Sentimental Disposition of (Popular) Trans- and Posthumanism” (20.5.2022). Research Conference Posthuman Encounters: Desires, Fears, and the Uncanny (19-21.5.2022), Universität des Saarlandes, Saarbrücken
  • “A Night at the Theatre: Cultural Practices of Late 18th- and Early 19th-Century Melodrama” (21.04.2022). Guest lecture, Department of Languages and Literature, University of Basel (Switzerland)

Outreach (Selections)

  • “Feeling Blue: Sam Mendes, Skyfall (2012)” (Casablanca Filmkunsttheater Nürnberg, 27.10.2025)
  • “Petromaskulinität als sentimentale Strategie der politischen Mobilisierung” (Evangelische Studierendengemeinde Erlangen,  14.1.2025)
  • “‘Spare Me this Sentimental Rubbish’: Paradoxien der Selbstjustiz in Licence to Kill (1989)” (Casablanca Filmkunsttheater Nürnberg, 25.11.2024)
  • Einführung in Charles Laughtons Die Nacht des Jägers / The Night of the Hunter im Rahmen der Filmreihe Global Melodrama – Das Melodram im Weltkino in Kooperation mit dem Filmhaus Nürnberg (27.5.2022)
  • Beitrag im Rahmen der Veranstaltung “Sentimentalität erfahren – Experiencing Sentimentality” (Kay Kirchmann) im Rahmen der Langen Nacht der Wissenschaften 2022, Experimentiertheater der FAU (21.5.2022)

Teaching (Selections)

  • Master Class “Britons: Forging and Sentimentalizing the Nation” (Wintersemester 2025-26)

Taking our cue from Linda Colley’s classic study Britons (1992), we will explore how Wales, Scotland and England joined together and forged a new ‘British’ identity which now coexists uneasily with more localized identities, but specifically with ‘Englishness’. This imagined community of ‘Britons’ involves, in the late 18th century, revised constructions of ‘national identity’ and what is considered the ‚national character‘ of the people. According to Harold Perkin, “[b]etween 1780 and 1850 the English ceased to be one of the most aggressive, brutal, rowdy, outspoken, riotous, cruel and bloodthirsty nations in the world and became one of the most inhibited, polite, orderly, tender-minded, prudish and hypocritical” (The Origins of Modern English Society, 1780-1880). This shift still informs current stereotypes (such as ‘stiff upper lip’, ‘gentlemanly behavior’, but perhaps also football hooliganism). We will explore representations of such identity positions in texts ranging from Shakespeare’s Henry V to James Bond films. We will also consider perceived challenges to dominant ‘national characteristics’, such as a ‘sentimentalization’ of British public life (e.g. in reaction to Princess Diana’s funeral in September 1997 and at the anniversary of her death in 2017) – but also the sentimental strain that runs through British life. It can be traced in ‚Victorian Sentimentalities‘ (e.g. in Dickens), sentimental representations of Queen Victoria, sentimental men in novels of the late 19th century and the sentimentalism of Bollywood in Britain. It also informs forms of social organization in Britain – including concepts of ‘class’ (we will look at Ealing films of the 1950s and the British New Wave and gritty ‘social realism’ of the 1960s and ’70s) and of ‘family’ (ranging from representations of working-class families to the one that resides in Windsor).

  • Hauptseminar “Early Modern and Postmodern Affective Cultures: Staging/Filming Shakespeare” (Sommersemester 2025-26)

This seminar will look at the affective and emotional impact of Shakespeare’s plays on early-modern and on contemporary audiences. The plays have affected audiences in a bodily sense (from laughter to tears), evoked feelings and enlisted emotions, and we will consider such affects, feelings and emotions in their respective cultural contexts. Our focus will then be on the political and ideological purposes they may serve. In the process, we will consider both early-modern stagings of plays, including Richard II, Titus Andronicus, Romeo and Juliet, The Taming of the Shrew, 1 Henry VI and The Winter’s Tale, and contemporary film adaptations.

  • Thematisches Kombimodul (Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik): “Historicity and Sentimentality” (Wintersemester 2023-24)
  • Hauptseminar “The Sentimental Disposition of Popular Posthumanism” (Sommersemester 2023)

We will focus on TV (HBO’s Westworld [2016–20] and Channel 4’s Humans [2015–18]), but will also consider H.G. Wells’ 1896 work of science fiction, The Island of Dr. Moreau and other, shorter texts to consider how popular trans- and posthumanist fictions do not just inquire into the politics of what it means to be ‘human’, but how they use sentimental tropes and scripts in the process.

  • Hauptseminar “Tears, Idle Tears”: Sadness and Loss in 19th-Century British Culture” (Sommersemester 2022)

“Tears, idle, tears, I know not what they mean, / Tears from the depth of some divine despair / Rise in the heart, and gather to the eyes”, Tennyson wrote in his pseudo-mediaeval long poem The Princess in 1847. Sentimentality, Carolyn Burdett has argued, defines Victorian culture and tone as much as the mills of the industrial north, the poverty of city slums, or the extension of the franchise. This seminar looks at representations of sadness and suffering, loss and nostalgia in British literature and culture of the 19th century, and the cultural and ideological work that they do. In addition to poetry such as Tennyson’s, we will look at Victorian melodrama, genre paintings, and social problem novels of the 1830s and ’40s – specifically those of Charles Dickens (famously celebrated – or denigrated – by Trollope as “Mr Popular Sentiment” in 1855).

  • Oberseminar “Melodrama” (Sommersemester 2021)

Melodrama has had many lives. As a theatrical genre in the 19th century, it dominated the popular European stages. In film, it surfaced as historical costume drama in the UK in the 1940s (“Gainsborough melodramas”) and in Douglas Sirk’s domestic Hollywood melodramas of the 1950s, but it also inflected British Social Problem and New-Wave films and hardboiled-detective fictions, and was arguably a defining feature in shaping Nicolas Cage’s career in action films in the 1990s. Melodrama may have owed much of its success to the fact that it continues to question and transcend traditional generic categories. As a modality, it traverses genres and media and works at sensitive cultural and aesthetic boundaries (Gledhill). As a mode of expression, both artistic and political, it is a crucial feature of modernity. This seminar will look at the various incarnations of melodrama in the 19th and 20th century, with a focus on plays and films.