Alison Lewis
Emeritus Professor Alison Lewis
- Post Nominals: FAHA
- Fellow Type: Fellow
- Elected to the Academy: 2005
- Section(s): European Languages And Cultures, Cultural And Communication Studies
Biography
Alison Lewis is Professor of German at the University of Melbourne in the School of Languages and Linguistics. She has made a distinguished contribution to German Studies in Australia. She has published four monographs to critical international acclaim and a fifth is forthcoming on secret police informers and the culture of surveillance in the GDR. Her first book on East German writer Irmtraud Morgner was recently described by one British scholar as “the most important feminist reading of Morgner”. Her second book on literature and the secret police, Die Kunst des Verrats (2003) was reviewed positively in the German daily Die Franfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.
Alison is a fellow of the Alexander von Humbolt Foundation and has published in leading academic journals in the USA, Canada, UK and Germany in the fields of eighteenth and twentieth-century German literature, unification studies, cultural studies and gender studies.
Her contributions span authors such as Heinrich von Kleist, Martin Walser, Monika Maron, Irmtraud Morgner, Christa Wolf, Birgit Vanderbeke and Brigitte Burmeister and touch on issues of history, memory and politics, gender and the body, trauma, auto/biography, intellectuals, the Cold War history and the Stasi. She publishes in English and German.