Iga Nowicz

Iga Nowicz studied German and Russian in Oxford (BA, 2011), Slavonic and Intercultural German Studies in Heidelberg and European Literature in Cambridge (MPhil, 2013). In 2018, she received her Joint-PhD in German Studies from King’s College London and the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and was awarded a Summa cum laude for her thesis.  

Iga has taught at universities in London, Berlin, Flensburg and Vienna and helped set up a Berlin-based mentoring programme for women and non-binary persons in academia. She is a trained editor and has worked as a journalist covering local issues on the Polish-German border. She has published academic and popular texts on German literature, language and film. Her texts were featured in the Märkische Oderzeitung and the Berlin-based multilingual literary journal stadtsprachen.  

Iga’s interdisciplinary book project building on her PhD thesis won the Women in German Studies Book Prize 2018 and will soon appear as Interrupted Stories. Multilingualism in Post-Yugoslav Literature in Germany and Austria with Peter Lang Oxford. In the book, she looks at three post-Yugoslav authors writing in German: the winner of the German Book Prize Saša Stanišić, the German author Marica Bodrožić and the lesser-known Austrian author Alma Hadžibeganović.  

Drawing on sources from history, sociology, feminist theory, trauma studies and linguistics, she argues that post-Yugoslav texts use multilingual strategies to explore the complex interplay of linguistic, ethnic, gender and sexual difference in the former Yugoslavia and to interrogate the monolingual paradigm dominant in Western Europe. She argues that post-Yugoslav literature – written in German and born out of spatial and linguistic dislocation – can open up new imaginary realms of solidarity and point to transnational bonds that counter the acute sense of loss and speechlessness induced by trauma.

Iga’s interests include comparative literature, gender studies, decolonial theory, literary translation and creative writing. Her current research project is concerned with linguistic practice as a tool of ex-in-clusion.