Amy Leech

Amy Leech is a DAAD fellow at FMSP during the academic year 2021-22. She is a PhD fellow in the Germanic Languages Department and affiliate of the Institute for Comparative Literature at Columbia University in the City of New York. Her doctoral thesis is titled “A Multidirectional Europe: Post-Socialist Memory and the Holocaust in Contemporary German Literature”. This project, conceived as an interdisciplinary study on literature, memory, and migration, analyses novels by Herta Müller (1953-), Nino Haratischwili (1983-), Terézia Mora (1971-) and Saša Stanišić (1978-) and explores how these authors frame the memory of socialism in relation to the Holocaust, ultimately challenging the larger post- or transnational discourse of a supposedly “unified Europe.” In dialogue with Michael Rothberg’s conceptualization of multidirectional memory, the project contributes to ongoing debates on resonances between different histories of violence.

Amy’s research interests include Austrian and German Literature & Film 1945 to present, Literary Modernism, Feminist Scholarship, Memory Studies, Migration, Post-dramatic Theatre, and the Environmental Humanities.