Katherine Calvert

I joined the University of Leeds as a Leverhulme Research Fellow in November 2024. My project is entitled Mobilising the Masses: Appeals to Emotion in German Political Writing, 1871 – 1933 and investigates how discourses of emotion shaped political appeals to mass audiences in Imperial and Weimar Germany. Building on interdisciplinary approaches from cultural studies and the history of emotions, I will study how voices from across the political spectrum adopted and adapted ideas of emotion and scientific rationality in attempts to attract support for disparate causes, including the colonial movement, feminism, pacifism, and communism, around the turn of the twentieth century.

Before joining the University of Leeds, I was a Government of Ireland Postdoctoral Research Fellow at University College Dublin (2022 – 2024), where my research examined the relationships between political activism and psychological well-being in German feminist essays, anthologies, and pamphlets from around 1970 to the present day. I have also held a Leibniz Summer Fellowship at the Leibniz Centre for Contemporary History in Potsdam (2024) and previously taught German language at Nottingham Trent University (2021 – 2022) and German language, history, and culture at the University of Sheffield (2017 – 2022), where I also completed my WRoCAH-funded PhD in 2021. My doctoral thesis explored representations of motherhood in socialist and socially-critical women’s writing from the Weimar Republic.

My research expertise encompasses nineteenth- to twenty-first-century German literature, print media and cultural history, the history of emotions, and the history of German social movements, in particular the German women’s movements. I am especially interested in how and why complex political and psychological ideas are suffused with the language of emotion and disseminated to mass audiences via print media and popular fiction publications. My work investigates the tensions that emerge around political discourses and practices, particularly in relation to political authors’ and journalists’ popularisation of scientific ideas to underpin claims of rationality in texts promoting highly emotionally laden ideologies.