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Dr. Aileen Jorena Behrendt

Senior Lecturer

 

Am Neuen Palais 10
Building 19, Room 0.20

 

consulting hours
Wednesdays 1-2 p.m.

about

My current research project explores how 21st century sitcoms focus on themes of psychological and cultural trauma.
I completed my PhD thesis on Dynamic Stasis and Gender Politics in British Novels of the 1930s, focusing on Nancy Mitford, Stevie Smith, Rosamond Lehmann and Jean Rhys in 2019. My dissertation was supervised by Prof. Dr. Dirk Wiemann and Prof. Dr. Eveline Kilian (Humboldt- Universität zu Berlin) and won the Gender Award of the Philosophical Faculty at the University of Potsdam in 2019.

In 2017 and 2018 I was a Visiting Scholar at the University of Washington in Seattle, WA, USA. I graduated from the master’s programme English Literatures at Humboldt-University Berlin in 2014 and received my bachelor’s degree from the University of Potsdam in 2011. I spent an Erasmus semester at the University of Hull.  
 

international conference

Writing a British Childhood in a Global Context?

Critical Perspectives on Enid Blyton

University of Potsdam, 25-27 September 2024

research and teaching interests

  • British Humour and Contemporary Comedy
  • Fandom and Television Studies
  • Literature and Economy
  • Gender and Queer Theory
  • Cultural and Literary Theory
  • Modernism
  • Metropolitan Cultures
  • Victorian Literature and Culture

 

academic projects

‘Against the Economic Imperative – Jean Rhys’s Interwar Women as Capitalist Failures.’ Writing the Economic Subject in Modern Western Europe, Ed. Nick Courtman and Aileen Behrendt. Peter Lang (2021)

with Nick Courtman. ‘Introduction.‘ Writing the Economic Subject in Modern Western Europe, Peter Lang (2021)

Gender Politics and British Women Writers of the1930s. Königshausen & Neumann (2020)

 ‘Female Friendships, Domesticity and the Construct of Englishness in Winifred Watson’s Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day.’ Comedy and Intermodernism in Fiction by British Women Authors, 1930-1960, Cambridge Scholars Publishing (2020)

‘Policing Female Bodies – Narratives of Illegal Abortions in Interwar British Literature and Beyond’, lecture series: Geschichte, Politik und Ethik des Schwangerschaftsabbruchs (11/2018)

‘Who can we laugh at? – British Humour in Times of Brexit’, Hard Times 101 (11/2018)