Dr Hannah Scheithauer

Prior to teaching at St John’s, I studied French, German, Comparative Literature, and Critical Translation at Oxford (B.A., M.St. D.Phil.), and spent time at Göttingen University, École Normale Supérieure in Paris, and Freie Universität Berlin.

Teaching

In 2025-26, I am responsible for the organisation of French teaching at the College, and I teach papers across the modern period of French literature from the late 18th century to the present day.
Outside of College, I lecture for the Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages, including a lecture series on the Francophone Algerian writer Assia Djebar and a lecture on the introductory course for first-year students. I am also a tutor on the M.St. Course in Francophone Postcolonial Literature, teaching seminars on memory and identity in Algerian narrative texts and on Francophone Caribbean writing.

My doctoral thesis, which I completed in 2025, explored the intersections of post-Holocaust and postcolonial memories in contemporary literatures in French and German. The project focused on narrative texts and worked through a series of comparative case studies, bringing together works by authors including Ingeborg Bachmann, Assia Djebar, Boualem Sansal, Jérôme Ferrari, Anne Weber, Anouar Benmalek, and Sharon Dodua Otoo. I was especially interested in the ways in which literary texts articulate ethical complexity, charting individual moral positions as they move across these highly contested histories. In so doing, literature responds productively to ongoing cultural controversies regarding whether Nazism and colonialism should be compared in the first place and encourages readers to reflect on the ethical stakes of memory culture today.

Building on the findings of my doctorate, I am currently developing a postdoctoral project which investigates the relationship between postcolonialism and postmigration in contemporary literature and theory.

Recent Publications

Scheithauer, Hannah, ‘Spectral time and the ethics of “multidirectional memory”: Anouar Benmalek’s Fils du Shéol (2015)’ Holocaust Studies (2025) https://doi.org/10.1080/17504902.2025.2563927

Scheithauer, Hannah, ‘Cycles of Violence and Fictions of the “Grey Zone” in Jérôme Ferrari’s Où j’ai laissé mon âme (2010)’, R. Gapper Postgraduate Prize essay, forthcoming with French Studies in 2026.