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Staff Profile

Dr Paul Leworthy

Leverhulme Early Career Fellow

Background

I am a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the School of Modern Languages at Newcastle University.


My research is highly interdisciplinary and ranges across German Studies, comparative literature, film studies, memory studies, semiotics and cultural history. Across all of my research, I am interested in how and what things mean, and, more specifically, in how texts, images, objects, space, places, people and institutions give shape to the past in the present.


I hold a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Edinburgh. Before moving to Edinburgh, I lived, studied and worked in Berlin. I completed an MA in European Literatures there at the Humboldt Universität zu Berlin, having previously read French and German at the University of Nottingham (with my year abroad split between Paris and Berlin).


I am the host of the Connecting Memories Podcast, a founding editor of Memory Studies Review and the Publicity Officer of the Association for German Studies in Great Britain and Ireland (AGS).

Research

My postdoctoral research project, Reading Reconstruction: Literary Responses to Rebuilding in Postwar West Germany, examines how the reconstruction of German cities after the Second World War was represented in postwar German-language literature, cinema and culture. The project asks how contemporaries perceived the massive and protracted efforts to rebuild West German cities and the extent to which reconstruction was seen as entangled with the memory of the Nazi past.


I am the author of The Shape of Memory: Containers, Surfaces and Forms of Remembering in Post-War European Literature (Peter Lang, 2026). Combining memory theory, cultural history and literary analysis, this book 1) surveys the role of objects and spaces in memory discourse, 2) exposes the impact of embodied experience on thinking about memory, and 3) offers a new lens for reading memory work in literary narratives – one focused on the ‘shape’ of memory. After introducing the concept of the “memory chronotope”, I subject novels by Günter Grass, Georges Perec, Patrick Modiano and Martin Walser to close, critical and contextualised readings. Ultimately, this book argues that container and surface spaces articulate different conceptions of memory and different attitudes towards specific histories.


Building on the concerns of my first monograph, I have also published on the 'geometry of commemoration' and 'the materials of memory', exploring how the shape, orientation and materiality of monuments, places and built environments contribute to cultural memory processes. Another key area of my research relates to the author Günter Grass. With Julian Preece, I co-edited a companion volume on his life and work that will appear in 2027, the centenary of the author's birth. I have also published on recent German cinema, looking at how films like Almanya - Willkommen in Deutschland (dir. Yasemin Şamdereli, 2011) and Das deutsche Volk (dir. Marcin Wierzchowski, 2025) engage in important (albeit very different kinds of) memory work in postmigrant contemporary Germany.

Publications