Dr. Marlene Dirschauer

Marlene Dirschauer earned her PhD in Comparative Literature from Freie Universität Berlin and is the author of Modernist Waterscapes: Water, Imagination and Materiality in the Works of Virginia Woolf. After completing her PhD at Friedrich Schlegel Graduate School in Berlin and the University of Cambridge, she received a scholarship from the Fritz Thyssen Foundation at Ludwig Maximilians-Universität München for a research project that examined literary representations of death and desire in late medieval and early modern women’s writings as a vehicle for emerging female subjectivity. This project was also funded by the FONTE Stiftung. From 2021 to 2022, Dirschauer was a visiting professor at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin.

In 2022, she joined the DFG Research Unit “Geistliche Intermedialität in der Frühen Neuzeit” at the University of Hamburg, where she also co-edited, with Marc Föcking, Rogier Gerrits, and Alec Ryrie, Practising Piety (Brill, 2025), a collection emerging from the group’s work on early modern religious culture and its medial forms. In the second funding period of the Research Unit (2026-2030), she examines, together with her colleagues Marc Föcking, Rogier Gerrits, and Susanne Rupp, fluid media of devotion in early modern literary culture.

She is also currently working on Grammars of Time, a book project that advances a new formalist reading of the religious experience of time in early modern devotional lyric. Together with Jonas Kellermann, she is co-editor of Shakespeare Seminar Online, and she was elected to the Board of the German Shakespeare Society in 2026.

Books

• Modernist Waterscapes. Water, Imagination and Materiality in the Works of Virginia Woolf (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2023)

Edited Volumes

• with Marc Föcking, Rogier Gerrits, and Alec Ryrie, Practising Piety. Intermediality and Devotion in Early Modern Europe. Leiden: Brill, 2025.

Journal Articles

• “Donne’s Future Perfect”, in: Cord Christian Casper, Lara Ehrenfried and Nikolina Hatton (eds): Early Modern Futures (Special Issue). Anglistik: International Journal of English Studies 36.3 (2025): 29-42.
• “‘The Secret of Perpetual Life’: Virginia Woolf’s Shakespeare”, Shakespeare Seminar 20 (2023): 16-25.
• “‘The World was out there still.’ World Alienation, Distance and Loneliness in Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation.” AmLit 2.1 (2022): 42-61. (peer-reviewed)

Chapters in Books

• “Punctuation & Rhythm in Virginia Woolf’s Early Stories”, in A History of Punctuation in English Literature, ed. by Jeffrey Guttierrez, Elizabeth Bonapfel, Mark Faulkner, and John Lennard (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), forthcoming 2028.
• with Marc Föcking, Rogier Gerrits, and Alec Ryrie: “Introduction”, in Practising Piety. Spiritual Intermediality and Devotion in Early Modern Europe, ed. by idem. (Leiden: Brill 2025), 1-46. (peer-reviewed) 
• with Marc Föcking, “‘Writ with Blood and Tears’. The Intermediality of Body and Text in Early Modern English and Italian Devotional Poetry”, in Practising Piety. Spiritual Intermediality and Devotion in Early Modern Europe, ed. by Marlene Dirschauer, Marc Föcking, Rogier Gerrits and Alec Ryrie (Leiden: Brill 2025). 194-222.
• “‘O give me quicknesse’. Engel als Katalysatoren geistlicher Intermedialität in George Herberts The Temple”, in: Ricarda Höffler, Oliver Huck und Johann Anselm Steiger (Hg.): Engel. Intermediale Konstellationen in geistlicher Kunst, Musik und Theologie der Frühen Neuzeit (Regensburg 2025). 163-174.
• “Hunting and the Making of the (Hu)man in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight”, in Hunting Troubles. Gender and Its Intersections in the Cultural History of the Hunt, ed. by Laura Beck and Maurice Saß (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2025). 37-52.
• “Die eigene Stimme im Geflecht: Intertextualität und Hybridisierung der Gattung als Textfiguren der Aneignung in den Sonetten von Lady Mary Wroth”, in Textfiguren der Emanzipation. Autorinnen des europäischen 17. und 18. Jahrhunderts wieder und wieder/wider lesen, hg. von Annina Klappert (Hannover: Wehrhahn, 2024). 171-192.
• “Thinking Outside the Box: Death and Gender in Women’s Autobiographical Poems in Early Modern England”, in Death and Gender in the Early Modern Period, ed. by Enrique Fernandez and Darlene Abreu-Ferreira (Leiden: Brill, 2024). 87-108. (peer- reviewed)
• “Why Look at Fish? Virginia Woolf’s Piscine Aesthetics”, in Virginia Woolf: Selected Papers: Vol. 32, Article 11. Available at: https://open.clemson.edu/vwoolfselectedpapers/vol32/iss1/11
• “Zeitenwandel und Wetterwechsel: Ein Streifzug durch Virginia Woolfs Meteopoetologie”, in Verfahren literarischer Wetterdarstellung. Meteopoetik – Literarische Meteorologie – Meteopoetologie, hg. von Urs Büttner und Michael Gamper (Berlin: De Gruyter 2021). 175-193.

Journal Editorships

• with Dr. Jonas Kellermann: Shakespeare Seminar Online der Deutschen Shakespeare Gesellschaft
• Shakespeare and Popular Culture (2025)
• “Who’s in, who’s out”: Community and Diversity in Shakespeare (2024)

Reviews

• Nic Helms and Steve Mentz (eds), Water and Cognition in Early Modern English Literature, in Shakespeare Jahrbuch 161, 2025.
• Gary Kuchar, Shakespeare and the World of “Slings & Arrows”. Poetic Faith in a Postmodern Age, in University of Toronto Quarterly, vol. 95, no. 3, 2026.

Peer Reviews

• For Palgrave Macmillan, Studies in the Novel, Woolf Studies Annual, Contemporary Women’s Writing, Zeitsprünge