Ian Ellison

Ian joined Wadham as a Visiting Fellow in 2024 as the post-doctoral researcher on the AHRC-funded "Kafka's Transformative Communities" project at the University of Oxford. He was previously a DAAD PRIME fellow at the University of Kent's Centre for Modern European Literature and Culture and the Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main, and has also worked as a stipendiary researcher at the Deutsches Literaturarchiv in Marbach am Neckar.

Ian holds a PhD in German and Comparative Literature from the University of Leeds, as well as an MPhil in European Literature from the University of Bristol and a BA in Modern European Languages with distinction in French, German, and Spanish from the University of Liverpool.

As part of a wider commitment to public engagement in the humanities, Ian writes for the Times Literary Supplement and the Los Angeles Review of Books. He is also active as a literary translator and in 2023 was shortlisted for the Peirene-Stevns Translation Prize.

Late Europeans and Melancholy Fiction at the Turn of the Millennium (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022)

‘Fraudulent Kafkas? His vexed afterlives in W. G. Sebald’s Vertigo and Antonio Muñoz Molina’s Sefarad’, in Gefälschte Provenienzen in der Literatur und ihren Wissenschaften, ed. Madeleine Brook and Stefanie Hundehege (Göttingen: Wallstein, Kulturen des Sammelns, work-in-progress, in preparation for 2024)

‘Medien und Presse’, Provenienz: Materialgeschichte(n) der Literatur, ed. Sarah Gaber, Stefan Höppner and Stefanie Hundehege (Göttingen: Wallstein, Kulturen des Sammelns, in press, forthcoming 2024)

‘Auf der Suche nach Übersetzung: Der “deutsche Proust” im Nachlass von Eva Rechel-Mertens’, Übersetzungen im Archiv: Potenziale und Perspektiven, ed. Franziska Humphreys, Anna Kinder, Douglas Pompeu, and Lydia Schmuck (Göttingen: Wallstein, Marbacher Schriften, in press, forthcoming 2024)

‘The Cult of Sebald’, W. G. Sebald in Context, ed. Uwe Schütte (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023), pp. 340–348

‘“Un hilo tenue de azares triviales”: Adaptive Imitation and Quixotic echoes in Antonio Muñoz Molina’s Sefarad’, in Romance Studies, 42:3 (in press, forthcoming 2024)

‘The late arrival of “der deutsche Proust”: Translating A la recherche du temps perdu into German’, in German Life and Letters, 76:4 (2023), pp. 525–546

‘La dominance de la mélancolie dans l’espace littéraire en Europe’, in Revue de littérature générale et comparée, 27 (2022). Available online: https://journals.openedition.org/trans/6566

‘World Literature and Literary Afterlife’, in The German Quarterly, 94:3 (2021), pp. 380-382

‘Melancholy Cosmopolitanism: Reflections on a genre of European literary fiction’, in History of European Ideas, 47:6 (2021), pp. 1022–1037

‘“Un homme marche dans la rue”: Parisian flânerie and Jewish cosmopolitanism in Patrick Modiano’s Dora Bruder’, in Modern Language Review, 116:2 (2021), pp. 264–280

‘“Eine Märchenerzählung, die […] älter geworden ist mit der verflossenen Zeit”: W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz as a melancholy Kunstmärchen’, in Oxford German Studies, 49:1 (2020), pp. 86–101

‘Ironic Detachment Will No Longer Do: On Sarah Watling’s Tomorrow Perhaps the Future: Writers, Outsiders, and the Spanish Civil War’ in Los Angeles Review of Books (26 December 2023). Available online: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/ironic-detachment-will-no-longer-do-on-sarah-watlings-tomorrow-perhaps-the-future/

‘Storytelling, in short: Exploring modern literary forms beyond the novel’ in Times Literary Supplement, 6296 (1 December 2023) Available online: https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/civic-storytelling-florian-fuchs-book-review-ian-ellison/

‘The Quixotic Inkblot: A bold reassessment of the European novel’, in Times Literary Supplement, 6295 (24 November 2023). Available online: https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/cervantes-the-poet-gabrielle-ponce-hegenauer-book-review-ian-ellison/

‘Through laughter and tears: The lighter side of the proud Castilian’, in Times Literary Supplement, 6275 (7 July 2023). Available online: https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/the-aesthetics-of-melancholia-luis-f-lopez-gonzalez-spanish-laughter-antonio-calvo-maturana-book-review-ian-ellison/

‘Free agent: The many faces of Franz Beckenbauer’, in Times Literary Supplement, 6274 (30 June 2023). Available online: https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/the-three-lives-of-the-kaiser-uli-hesse-book-review-ian-ellison/

‘Into the riptide: The modernists’ surprising affinity with the seaside’, in Times Literary Supplement, 6272 (16 June 2023). Available online: https://the-tls.co.uk/articles/modernism-at-the-beach-hannah-freed-thall-book-review-ian-ellison/

‘Tragic Revolutionary Comic Figures: On Joseph Harris’s Misanthropy in the Age of Reason’, in Los Angeles Review of Books (26 May 2023). Available online: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/tragic-revolutionary-comic-figures-on-joseph-harriss-misanthropy-in-the-age-of-reason/

‘Unboxing Rilke’s Nachlass’, in Los Angeles Review of Books (6 April 2023). Available online: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/unboxing-rilkes-nachlass/

‘In the mountain’s shadow: The impact of Thomas Mann’s magnum opus’, in Times Literary Supplement, 6254 (10 February 2023). Available online: https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/manns-magic-mountain-karolina-watroba-book-review-ian-ellison/

‘Heaven and Earth: the spiritual and the material in Golden Age’, in Times Literary Supplement, 6249 (6 January 2023), p. 25. Available online: https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/incomparable-realms-jeremy-robbins-book-review-ian-ellison/

‘Hotels du Lac: Marcel Proust’s holidays to Lake Geneva’, in Times Literary Supplement, 6234 (23 September 2022), p.24 . Available online: https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/marcel-proust-am-genfer-see-jurgen-ritte-book-review-ian-ellison/

‘To write good things: Brigitte Reimann’s many fresh starts’, in Times Literary Supplement, 6132 (9 October 2020), p. 10. Available online: https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/i-have-no-regrets-brigitte-reimann-review-ian-ellison/