Professor Clare Bielby

Profile

Biography

I took up the post of Senior Lecturer in Women’s Studies at the Centre for Women’s Studies in 2017, becoming Professor in Women’s and Gender Studies in 2026. Prior to that I was Lecturer in German Studies at the University of Hull.

While my background is in the humanities, primarily in cultural and literary studies, my work is interdisciplinary, taking in approaches also from the social sciences. My research interests fall within the interdisciplinary fields of German Studies, Feminist, Women’s and Gender Studies, Perpetrator Studies and Terrorism Studies. To date, my focus has been on ‘political’ violence and gender, especially in the German context, with a particular concentration on issues of representation, subjectivity, narratives of the self, and life writing. I’m also interested in the history of feminisms, especially German feminisms; queer studies and feminist queer theory.

My research has been supported by a Leverhulme Research Fellowship (in the academic year 2023–24). And I have been a Guest Researcher at the Program for the Study of Women, Gender, and Sexuality, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore (2026) and at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Berlin (within the project the History of Emotions [2009, 2013]).

I am co-founder of the York Gender and Violence Research Network and a ‘cooperation partner’ for the research network Military, War and Gender/Diversity (Militär, Krieg und Geschlecht/Diversität, MKGD). I am on the editorial board of the Peter Lang book series Women, Gender and Sexuality in German Literature and Culture and of CWS’s postgraduate journal Cultivate. I am also a subject editor for the Journal of Perpetrator Research. Professional Memberships include Women in German Studies, UK; the Association for German Studies, UK; the German History Society, UK.

Research

Overview

My most recent work (funded by a Leverhulme Research Fellowship) has focused on the post-terrorist autobiographies of German left-wing militants who were active in the Red Army Faction and 2 June Movement and have, since the 1970s, been publishing accounts of their lives. This project, with a particular focus on issues of gender, violence and time, culminated in my second monograph, Terrorism and the Self: Gender, Violence and Time in German Post-Terrorist Autobiography (2027). In the book, I conduct a feminist literary-critical analysis of these post-terrorist texts, mobilising autobiographical-theoretical and area studies approaches, as well as sociological and narrative criminological perspectives on violence, identity and meaning-making.

My first monograph, Violent Women in Print: Representations in the West German Print Media of the 1960s and 1970s (2012), explored how the troubling figure of the violent woman was represented – in word and image – across the spectrum of West German print-media publications. It focussed on the representation not only of high-profile left-wing militant women, such as Ulrike Meinhof and Gudrun Ensslin, but also of women who committed acts of violence for ‘personal’ reasons, such as Vera Brühne and the lesbian couple Marion Ihns and Judy Andersen. The book developed out of my PhD, written in the context of the AHRC-funded project ‘Representations of Women and Death in German Literature, Art and Media after 1500’, out of which emerged three collected volumes of essays. The third of those volumes I edited together with Anna Richards (Birkbeck): Women and Death 3: Women’s Representations of Death in German Culture since 1500 (2010). In 2019, a second volume of essays (co-edited with Jeffrey Murer), with a focus on perpetration, was published: Perpetrating Selves: Doing Violence, Performing Identity.

From 2018-2021, I was Co-Principal Investigator (along with Mererid Puw Davies, UCL) of the research project ‘Violence Elsewhere: Imagining Violence outside Germany since 1945’, funded by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD). Two volumes of essays (co-edited with Davies) emerged from that project and were published by Camden House in 2024: Violence Elsewhere 1: Imagining Distant Violence in Germany 1945–2001; Violence Elsewhere 2: Imagining Distant Violence in German Since 2001.

Supervision

I particularly welcome research students who take a feminist, humanities-grounded approach to the interdisciplinary fields of Perpetrator Studies, Terrorism Studies, Violence Studies and German Studies. I’m an experienced PhD supervisor, supervising feminist projects across a range of areas. Topics I supervise/ have supervised include:

• A Global History of West Germany’s ‘neue Frauenbewegung’
• Narratives of German and Austrian far-right women
• Borderline experience and its knowledges
• The experiences of the wives of Foreign and Commonwealth personnel in the British army
• The life writing of same-sex desiring women in India
• Hijra life writing and the representation of self
• Visualising embodied experiences of illness
• South Korean digital feminist activism
• Queer Tumblr
• Gender and space in the Saudi woman’s novel  

Publications

Selected publications

Books

• Terrorism and the Self: Gender, Violence and Time in German Post-Terrorist Autobiography. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2027.
• with Mererid Puw Davies, eds. Violence Elsewhere 2: Imagining Distant Violence in Germany since 2001. Rochester, N.Y: Camden House, 2024.
• with Mererid Puw Davies, eds. Violence Elsewhere: Imagining Distant Violence in Germany 1945-2001. Rochester, N.Y: Camden House, 2024.
• with Jeffrey Murer, eds. Perpetrating Selves: Doing Violence, Performing Identity. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018.
• Violent Women in Print: Representations in the West German Print Media of the 1960s and 1970s. Rochester, New York: Camden House, 2012.
• with Anna Richards, eds. Women and Death 3: Women’s Representations of Death in German Culture since 1500. Rochester, New York: Camden House, 2010.

Select journal articles and chapters

• “Narrating Violent Agency Elsewhere in Inge Viett’s Nie war ich furchtloser (Never was I more Fearless, 1996)”, in Violence Elsewhere: Imagining Distant Violence in Germany 1945-2001, ed. by Bielby and Mererid Puw Davies. Rochester, N.Y.: Camden House, 2024, pp. 149-73.
• “Gendering the Perpetrator – Gendering Perpetrator Studies”, in The Routledge International Handbook of Perpetrator Studies, ed. by Susanne Knittel and Zachary Goldberg. London: Routledge, 2019, pp. 155-168.  
• “Scripting the Perpetrating Self: Masculinity, Class and Violence in German Post-terrorist Autobiography”, in Perpetrating Selves: Doing Violence, Performing Identity, ed. by Bielby and Jeffrey Murer. Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018, pp. 85-111. 
• “Murder is a (lesbian) feminist issue: the Ihns/Andersen case and its impact on the New Women’s Movement”, in Women, Global Protest Movements, and Political Agency: Rethinking the Legacy of 1968, ed. by Sarah Colvin and Katharina Karcher. London: Routledge, 2018, pp. 98-114. 
• “West Germany’s neue Frauenbewegung and the productive potential of feminist (Gegen)gewalt”, in Forum for Modern Language Studies, 53:4 (2017): 379-404. 
• with Frauke Matthes. “Gender and Sexuality”, in Routledge Handbook of German Politics & Culture, ed. by Sarah Colvin. London: Routledge, 2015, pp. 250-267.
• “Bewaffnete Terroristinnen: Linksterrorismus, Gender und die Waffe in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland von den 1970er Jahren bis heute”, in WerkstattGeschichte 64, special issue ed. by Dagmar Ellerbrock and Ulrike Weckel (2014): 77-101.
• “The Hard Body of the Violent Terrorist Woman in the West German Print Media of the 1970s”, in Hard Bodies, ed. by Ralph J. Poole et al. Zurich: LIT-Verlag, 2011, pp. 176-196.
• “Remembering the Red Army Faction”, Memory Studies 3: 2 (2010): 137-150.

Teaching

Undergraduate

I teach on various modules at different levels in the Department of English and Related Literature

Postgraduate

I teach and convene the MA modules 'Gender and Violence' and 'Women, Citizenship and Conflict'.

I also contribute to team-taught core modules at the Centre for Women’s Studies.

External activities

Overview

I am on the editorial board of the Peter Lang series Women, Gender and Sexuality in German Literature and Culture, of the Journal of Perpetrator Studies, and of CWS’s postgraduate journal Cultivate.

Memberships

Professional Memberships include Women in German Studies, UK; the Association for German Studies, UK; the German History Society, UK; the German Studies Association, USA.