Dr. Magdalena Pfalzgraf

   

Dr. Magdalena Pfalzgraf is a research associate at the department of North American literary and Cultural Studies at Saarland University Saarbrücken and an adjunct faculty member at the New English Literatures and Cultures (NELK) subdivision at Goethe University Frankfurt. Her PhD thesis explores mobility dynamics in anglophone Zimbabwean literature in the post-2000 period. Research interests include Southern African literatures in English, Transculturality, Border studies, Mobility, Movement, and Migration in Literature, Music & Musical instruments in literature. Magdalena is consolidating research for her Habilitation on colonial and postcolonial literary engagements with music.

Magdalena is the treasurer of the German Association for Postcolonial Studies/ Gesellschaft für Anglophone Postkoloniale Studien (GAPS). For more information about GAPS, please write to treasurer@g-a-p-s.net

Teaching  WS 2020/21:

Pianos in Strange Places. Colonial Encounters and Transcultural Mobilisations (Hauptseminar).  Office hours per appointment.

Contact: m.pfalzgraf@em.uni-frankfurt.de, Magdalena.pfalzgraf@uni-saarland.de

Publications

Monograph

Crossing Borders, Transcending Boundaries: Mobility in Zimbabwean Literature in English. London: Routledge. Accepted. Forthcoming 2021.

Articles (peer reviewed), book chapters, other

“Rural-Urban Migration in Two Ghanaian Novels:  Benjamin Kwakye’s The Sun by Night  and Amma Darko’s The Housemaid.” Seasons of Migration to the South: Literatures of Intra-African Migrations. Ed.  Rebecca Fasselt and Aghogho Akpome. London: Routledge. Accepted. Forthcoming 2020. 

“Flânerie in Valerie Tagwira’s The Uncertainty of Hope. Tydskrif vir Letterkunde.  Accepted. Forthcoming 2020. 

“Walking Cities, Conquering Pavements. Foreword”. Tanaka Chidora. Because Sadness Is Beautiful? Poems. Harare: Mwanaka Media and Publishing, 2020. ix-xii.

“Representations of White Zimbabwean Mobilities in Recent Anglophone Fiction Graham Lang’s Lettah’s Gift (2011) and Ian Holding’s Of Beasts & Beings (2010).” Mobility and Minorities in Africa. Ed. Michele Carboni and  Giovanni Sistu. Rome: Aracne, 2019, 235–257. 

Anastasijevic, Silvia; Magdalena Pfalzgraf; Hanna Teichler. “Moving Centers & Traveling Cultures: Readings in Contemporary Anglophone Literatures”. Moving Centers & Traveling Cultures. Special Issue of Kairos. A Journal of Critical Symposium 4.1. (2019). Hrsg. diess. 1-8. http://kairostext.in/Introduction

Moving Centers & Traveling Cultures. Special Issue of Kairos. A Journal of Critical Symposium 4.1. (2019). Hrsg. von Anastasijevic, Silvia; Magdalena Pfalzgraf; Hanna Teichler.

“Micropolitics of Modernity.” Keywords in Transcultural English Studies. Department of English and American Studies, Goethe University Frankfurt, May 2017. 

“A Hundred Years After: The View from the Train as a Glimpse into a Lost Idyll in Edward Thomas’s ‘Adlestrop’ (1917).” Discourses of Mobility – Mobility of Discourse. The Conceptualization of Trains, Cars and Planes in 19th- and 20th-Century Poetry. Ed. Peter Wenzel and Sven Strasen. Trier: WVT, 2010. 71-79

Conference Contributions

“Literary Perspectives on Whiteness in post-2000 Zimbabwe” 27th Conference of the African Studies Association of the UK. University of Birmingham, September 2018.

Roundtable: “Tropes of Urbanity: Imagining African Urban Spaces Across Media”. 42nd Annual Conference of the African Literature Association. Yale University, Juni 2017.     

“The Failed City as a Space of Transnational Movement and Transcultural Encounters:  NoViolet Bulawayo’s We Need New Names (2013).” 16th Triennial EACLALS Conference. University of Oviedo, April 2017.

 “Mobile City Worlds in Zimbabwean Fiction Post-2000: Valerie Tagwira’s The Uncertainty of Hope (2006).” 17th Triennial ACLALS Conference. University of Stellenbosch, Juli 2016.

 “Adoption in Petina Gappah’s The Book of Memory.” 42nd Annual Conference of the African Literature Association. Kennesaw State University and Emory University, April 2016.

Awards and Grants

Evangelisches Studienwerk Villigst (Villigst Academic Foundation)

Doctoral Scholarship, (Jan 2016 – Oct 2018)

Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD) (German Academic Exchange Service)

Travel Grant for research in Harare and Dar es Salaam, Oct – Dec 2014

Friedrich Wilhelm Award for outstanding thesis, RWTH Aachen, 2012

Studienstiftung des Deutschen Volkes/German Academic Foundation

Scholarship, 2008 – 2011

Research Trips

Harare, Zimbabwe, June 2016 (Villigst travel grant)

University of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, Nov – Dec 2014 (DAAD travel grant)

University of Zimbabwe, Harare, Sep 2014 – Nov 2014 (DAAD travel grant)