Dr Elizabeth Ramsey

Elizabeth is the Gaylord and Dorothy Donnelly Early Career Research Fellow at Corpus Christi (from September 2024). A former state school student, she received her PhD in modern German literature from the University of Chicago in 2024. Elizabeth previously studied at the University of Oxford (MSt in German), where her research was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, as well as at the University of Warwick (BA in German with Italian). She has also spent two years doing research in Berlin, at the Humboldt-Universität and at the Freie Universität.

Elizabeth’s research for her doctoral dissertation concerned concepts of play in German literary texts from the long nineteenth century, including Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Clemens Brentano, E.T.A Hoffmann, and Franz Kafka. She is interested in how scenes of literary play can have structural significance for the narratives in which they are to be found, and the link between play and agency in literature.

She is currently working on a book project based on her dissertation, as well as a new project examining the work of the Austrian writer Arthur Schnitzler using the Cambridge Schnitzler Archive, which houses a large portion of the writer’s papers. She is currently working on Schnitzler’s reception of other German writers, especially as this relates to the depiction of female figures in his writings.