Katharina Karcher

I joined the Department of Modern Languages as Lecturer in German at Birmingham in September 2018. Prior to this post, I had a lectureship at the University of Bristol and held research fellowships at the University of Warwick and the University of Cambridge. I hold degrees in German Studies, Gender Studies, and Cultural Studies, and my research and teaching draw on insights and theories from these and other academic fields.

My research combines theories and methods from cultural studies, history and feminist theory to analyse social movements, protest cultures, and political violence in the post-1945 era from a gender perspective.

I have published widely on feminist protest and female political violence in the Federal Republic of Germany. My first monograph, developed out of my PhD with the support of a MHRA Research Scholarship and titled “Sisters in Arms?”: Militant Feminisms in the Federal Republic of Germany since 1968, was published by Berghahn in 2017. A German edition of the book (partly funded by the Rosa-Luxemburg foundation) was published in September 2018 by Assoziation A.

My current research links historical and contemporary debates about political extremism in the UK and in Germany. Drawing on new archival material, I will offer the first detailed study of the English exile of Germany’s iconic student leader, Rudi Dutschke. Following the attempt to assassinate him in 1968, Dutschke sought medical treatment in England and lived there until 1971, when he had to leave because he was considered a threat to national security. My research not only contributes to a better understanding of Dutschke’s political thought and life; it also offers a timely perspective on discourses and debates concerning the alleged threat that immigrants pose to national security.

From 2020 until 2026, I have led the ERC-funded project Urban Terrorism in Europe (2004-19): Remembering, Imagining, and Anticipating Violence. This project offered an in-depth analysis of the collective forms of forgetting, remembering, and imagining that have shaped urban spaces in the aftermath of recent terrorist attacks and used art as a creative tool to experiment with alternative forms of remembering and visions of the future.

Another key focus of my work lies in research ethics, with a particular emphasis on sensitive and emotionally challenging research settings.