Dr. Tim Sommer
Tim Sommer is Lecturer in English Literature and Culture at the University of Passau. He previously worked as a lecturer and postdoctoral researcher at the English Department of the University of Heidelberg, where he also obtained his PhD. He has been a Visiting Fellow at Harvard University, an Academic Visitor at the University of Cambridge, and a Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Edinburgh. During the 2023–24 academic year, he is an Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Feodor Lynen Fellow at the University of Oxford and a Visiting Fellow at Exeter College. In 2024, he was elected as a Junior Fellow of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities and became a member of the Academy's Junges Kolleg.
His research mainly covers British literature from the eighteenth century to the present, with a special focus on Romantic and Victorian poetry and non-fictional prose and on the twentieth-century novel (with occasional forays into early modern literature and culture). Areas of thematic and methodological interest include authorship (especially questions of race and gender), translation and transcultural contact, literary and cultural institutions, the history of the book, and the discourse of the digital humanities. He draws on a range of comparative approaches (transatlantic studies, postcolonial theory, world literature) to situate anglophone literature in a global context. He currently works on a literary and institutional history of the modern archive from the fin-de-siècle rise of literary manuscript collecting via the post-1945 archive boom to recent trends such as the archiving of contemporary writers' papers and the institutional acquisition of born-digital “manuscripts.”
Dr. Tim Sommer
Office: PHIL 175
Tel.: +49 (0)851-509-2797
tim.sommer@uni-passau.de
Office Hours
I am on research leave from October 2023 to September 2024. During this period, I will not be holding regular office hours but can be reached via email.
(I am happy to supervise B.A. and M.A. theses. Please get in touch via email to discuss your project.)