Ann-Marie Einhaus

My primary research interests are writing about the First World War, the short story, and European literary magazine culture of the war and inter-war period. My first monograph, The Short Story and the First World War (CUP, 2013), explored literary engagement with the war in the medium of short fiction in literary and popular magazines and anthologies from 1914 to the present. Related to these interests, I edited a new Cambridge Companion to the English Short Story (CUP, 2016), and co-edited (jointly with my colleague Katherine Baxter) the Edinburgh Companion to the First World War and the Arts for Edinburgh University Press in 2017. At present I'm working on a new book project with the working title 'Reading and Reviewing European Literature in Britain, 1919–1932'. This book explores inter-war engagement with foreign language literature in Britain, how continental European authors and texts were read and reviewed in periodicals and how their reception fits into broader discourses of transcultural literacy and language learning between the wars.

I also have an interest in links between contemporary literary representations of the First World War and the war’s memory. As PI, I was recently awarded a major AHRC Research Grant for a collaborative project titled 'Ephemera and Writing about War in Britain, 1914 to the Present', which will run from September 2021 to February 2024. Working alongside colleagues in History and Creative Writing at Northumbria University (Dr Ann-Marie Foster, May Sumbwanyambe and Dr Tony Williams) and the University of Exeter (Prof. Catriona Pennell and Dr Chris Kempshall), I will explore the use of ephemera (real and fictional) in contemporary writing that seeks to tell the stories of individuals and communities beyond Western mainstream commemoration of the First World War.

This latest project has grown out of a longer-standing interest in the way in which the First World War and its literature are taught in secondary schools and universities across the UK, and I was Co-Investigator on an AHRC-funded exploratory research project - 'The First World War in the Classroom: Teaching and the Construction of Cultural Memory' (2013-2014) - with Dr Catriona Pennell at the University of Exeter. Our project was based on a survey of secondary-school teachers in England, exploring aims, methods and topics connected with teaching the First World War in the light of the war's upcoming centenaries and its coverage in the news, film and literature. Please visit the project website for details and a full project report. 

I also acted as an Advisory Board member and event co-organiser for the AHRC-funded Teaching and Learning War research network (2017-2019), which brought together researchers and educators from the UK and different Commonwealth countries with an interest in how the two world wars are taught and commemorated by and for young people. More details are available on the network webpages.

Ann-Marie researches and teaches modern and contemporary literature and culture and is currently PI on the AHRC-funded project 'Ephemera and writing about war, 1914 to the present' (2021-2024). She joined the Department of Humanities at Northumbria as Lecturer in January 2012, having previously studied and taught at Durham and at the University of Freiburg, Germany. She works primarily in the fields of First World War studies and early-twentieth-century British literature and culture, with special interests in short fiction, in periodicals and, more recently, in the reviewing and reception of foreign-language literature in inter-war Britain. Ann-Marie has additional research interests in links between the teaching, literature and remembrance of war, and in the interrelation between literature and history/historiography. She works and publishes on a wide range of early-twentieth-century writers and magazines, and on contemporary historical fiction about the First World War. Ann-Marie is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, a Fellow of the English Association, and teaches across several programmes and modules in the department on modernist literature, war and conflict, and on literature and identity. She welcomes inquiries from prospective postgraduate students wishing to work on any aspect of literature and/of conflict, inter-war magazine culture or modern British short fiction.