Fitxa persona

Brigitte Jirku, PhD in German Philology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA (1990). She has studied German and French philology and has taught at several universities, especially in the United States. She currently works as a Professor of German Literature in the “Departament of English and German Philology”. In the last twenty years she has carried out numerous research stays in German and Austrian universities and is a senior collaborator with the Elfriede Jelinek Forschungszentrum (Universität Wien).

Her recent research has focused on the study of gender discourses in relation to discourses of power and violence in German-language literature. In addition, her work on literary spaces exploring memories of collective and individual violence has led her to analyze the victim-perpetrator paradigm and its redefinition in contemporary German-language literary texts.

She has been principal investigator of R&D research projects on the study and reception of German-language postdramatic theater (2006-2011) and is currently a member of the research project on contemporary representations of perpetrators of mass crimes (www.repercrirg.com).

Author and co-editor of several publications on autobiographical discourses and the representation of women and womanhood in the 18th-21st centuries, gender studies in German-language literature and on the representation of violence in literature and media. Since 2017 she is co-editor of the collection "Signatures of Violence. Studies in Literature and Media" (Peter Lang) and member of several scientific committees.