Background

I am a literary theorist of 20th and 21st C German-language texts - fiction, poetry and continental philosophy; I also work in film studies and visual culture. I teach the cultural content aspects of the curriculum for our degree programmes and have been teaching at Newcastle since 2004. Before that I taught at Warwick University and Oxford Brookes University.

Roles and Responsibilities

Personal Tutor - Student consultation Wed 9-11

Exams contact

Assistant Chair of Board of Examiners, Chair of Stage 2 Board of Examiners

Qualifications

BA (Hons) German and Russian (Cambridge)
MA Modern German Literature and Theory(London)
Postgraduate Certificate in Teaching in Higher Education (Warwick)
PhD German Studies (Warwick)

Previous Positions

2003-2004: Senior Lecturer in German, Oxford Brookes University.
2001-2003: Temporary Lecturer in German, University of Warwick.
1997-2001: Graduate Teaching Assistant, University of Warwick.

Memberships

Women in German Studies, AGS

Recent publications:

'Towards a Decolonial Uncanny: Re-configuring the Ineffable in Anna Kim's 'Greenland' novel Anatomie einer Nacht  https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5699/austrianstudies.29.2021.0068

'Pluralised Selves and the Postmigrant Sublime' https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/politics-and-culture-in-germany-and-austria-today/pluralized-selves-and-the-postmigrant-sublime-isolde-charims-ich-und-die-anderen-2018-and-wolfgang-fischers-styx-2018/B3648DC1D0155375A8153657DFE1E1A6

I am currently writing on self-other relationality and the body in contemporary philosophy (poststructuralism and phenomenology) and literature which includes notions of trauma and the uncanny; other projects include contemporary re-workings of the sublime in literature, film and philosophy; pluralism and identity, diversity and difference with Derrida, Heidegger, Deleuze, Žižek, and Isolde Charim;

I am currently working on Posthumanisms and new materialisms, eco-criticism, 'eco-deconstruction', vegetal philosophy,  animal studies with a view to applying these models to contemporary literature, poetry and film.

Previously, I have worked extensively on the German writer, poet, essayist Anne Duden. What initially fascinated me about her writing was how difficult it was to understand and how radical the questions were that the texts seemed to be raising. Not only her abstract poetry but also her prose and essays presented interesting interpretative dilemmas, and I linked my readings of her texts to philosophers such as Nietzsche, Adorno, Irigaray, Lacan, and Deleuze to focus on a nexus of ideas at the intersection of aesthetics, politics and ethics. The texts return to the narrators’ extreme experiences of breakdown which seem to go beyond speech so I got interested in the themes of the ineffable, fragmentation and the sublime. This led me to engage with theories (primarily poststructuralist and psychoanalytic) on modes of subject formation, subject-object relations, the unconscious, nature/culture relations.

Questions about how to represent the ‘unrepresentable’ and narrations of trauma fed into research on the Austrian writer, Thomas Bernhard, and the role of silence in his works. I looked at the politics of narration in conjunction with Lyotard’s concept of the differend to think about both wide concepts like power, oppression and injustice, but also the specificities of Bernhard’s narrative situations where, for instance, there is often a relation between a conspicuously garrulous Austrian male narrator and silent/silenced characters. Recently, I edited a special collection of articles on Contemporary Trauma Narratives (2019) which pursued this question of the relation between silence and speech and developed new concepts in trauma theory.

Postgraduate Supervision

Contemporary and Modern German Literature and poetry, philosophy and film

Undergraduate Teaching

GER2036 Berlin: culture, film and literature from the Weimar Republic to the present day

GER2036 Writers, Media and Society in the Bundesrepublik Deutschland (West Germany)

SML1021 Introduction to European and Latin American Cinema

GER4011 German Film up to 1945

GER4007 Misfits and Miscreants in Contemporary German/Austrian Fiction.

GER3052 Advanced Translation: German-English; English-German

SML4099 Dissertation

 

• Ludden TC. Towards a Decolonial Uncanny: Re-configuring the Ineffable in Anna Kim's 'Greenland' novel Anatomie einer Nacht (2012). Austrian Studies 2021, 29, 68-85.
• Ludden TC. Pluralised Selves and the Postmigrant Sublime: Isolde Charim's Ich und die Anderen and Wolfgang Fischer's Styx. In: Frauke Matthes, Dora Osborne, Katya Kryolva, Myrto Aspioti, ed. Politics and Culture in Germany and Austria Today. New York: Camden House Inc, 2020, pp.34-57. In Press.
• Ludden T. Introduction: On creativity and not-knowing in trauma narratives and theories. German Life and Letters 2019, 72(4), 399-426.
• Ludden T. Introduction: On Creativity and Not-Knowing in Trauma Narratives and Theories. German Life and Letters 2019, 72(4), 399-426.
• Ludden T. Mobilisations of Mediation and Aporias: Reading Trauma as Metaphor in Ulrike Draesner's Sieben Spruenge vom Rand der Welt with Caruth, Derrida and Agamben. German Life and Letters 2019, 72(4), 443-468.
• Ludden T. Deviant Bodies and Eating Disorders in Ulrike Draesner’s Mitgift and Karen Duve’s Dies ist kein Liebeslied. In: Petra Bagley, Francesca Calamita and Kathryn Robson, ed. Starvation, Food Obsession and Identity. London, UK: Peter Lang, 2017, pp.91-120.
• Ludden T. Distorted Antigones: Dialectics and Prostitution in Lola and Shirins Hochzeit. In: Hipkins D; Taylor-Jones K, ed. Prostitution and Sex Work in Global Cinema: New Takes on Fallen Women. New York, NY, USA: Palgrave MacMillan, 2017, pp.147-171.
• Ludden TC. 'Even the word "und" has to be re-invented somehow': Quoting the language of the perpetrators in texts by Anne Duden. Edinburgh German Yearbook 2014, 8.
• Ludden T. Hearing the Silences in Thomas Bernhard's Ja: Difference, Narrative and Lyotard's Concept of the Differend. German Life and Letters 2010, 63(1), 6-19.
• Ludden T. Kisten, Krypten, Labyrinthe: Raumfigurationen in der Gegenwartsliteratur. W. G. Sebald, Anne Duden, Herta Müller. Modern Language Review 2010, 105(1), 289-290.
• Ludden T. "Getting back to the umbilical cord": Psychoanalysis, feminism and The Tin Drum. In: Shafi, M, ed. Approaches to Teaching Grass's The Tin Drum. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2008, pp.185-197.
• Ludden T. Female Allegory and the Critique of German History in Helma Sanders-Brahms's Deutschland Bleiche Mutter. In: Hipkins, D; Plain, G, ed. War-Torn Tales: Literature, Film and Gender in the Aftermath of World War II. Oxford, Berne etc: Peter Lang, 2007, pp.239-258.
• Ludden T. Birth and the Mother in Materialist Feminist Philosophy and Contemporary German Texts. Women: A Cultural Review 2006, 17(3), 341-354.
• Ludden T. 'Das Undarstellbare darstellen' : Kulturkritik and the Representation of Difference in the works of Anne Duden. Berlin: Weidler Buchverlag, 2006.
• Ludden T. History, memory and Montage in Anne Duden's Das 'Judasschaf'. In: German Life and Letters: Interenational Conference on Memory Contests, Cultural Memory, Hybridity and Identity in German Discourses Since 1990. 2006, Dublin, Ireland: Wiley-Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
• Ludden T. Nature, Bodies and Breakdown in Anne Duden's 'Das Landhaus' and Karen Duve's Regenroman. In: Bartel, H; Boa, E, ed. Pushing at Boundaries: Approaches to Contemporary German Women Writers from Karen Duve to Jenny Erpenbeck. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006, pp.41-55.
• Ludden T. Die Revolte der Schlange: Differenz/Differánce bei Anne Duden. In: Gruber, B; Preußer, H-P, ed. Weiblichkeit als politisches Programm? Sexualität, Macht und Mythos. Wuerzburg: Koenigshausen und Neumann, 2005, pp.153-166.
• Ludden T. Allegories of Cultural Relations: Anne Duden’s Reading of Representations of St. George and the Dragon in Der Wunde Punkt im Alphabet. German Life and Letters 2004, 57(1), 69-90.
• Ludden T. Writing Differences: Bodies and Modes of Relationality in Works by Anne Duden. New Readings 2004, 7.
• Ludden T. Material Movements in texts by Anne Duden. In: Boa, E; Bartel, H, ed. Anne Duden: A Revolution of Words. Approaches to her Fiction, Poetry and Essays. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2003, pp.72-87.