Professor Benjamin Kohlmann

Benjamin Kohlmann is a historian of British literature and culture working on the period from 1860 to the present.

He has a special interest in the relationship between literature and politics, including the literary and cultural histories of socialism. Having pursued undergraduate and postgraduate work at Freiburg and at Yale, he earned his doctorate from the University of Oxford in 2010. He held numerous visiting and postdoctoral fellowships in the US and the UK before taking up his current post at the University of Regensburg (Germany) in 2020.

Much of Benjamin’s early research focussed on British modernism, especially the politicized modernism of the later interwar years. This work includes his first monograph, “Committed Styles: Modernism, Politics, and Left Wing Literature in the 1930s” (Oxford UP, 2014). More recently, his work has included the prehistory of the welfare state (c.1860-1940); literary and cultural histories of populism; comparative and global approaches to literature; and literary and cultural theory. His second monograph, “British Literature and the Life of Institutions: Speculative States”, was published by Oxford UP in 2021.

With Janice Ho (UBC Vancouver) and Matthew Taunton (UEA), he is co-editor of a new book series with Oxford UP on “Literature and Politics”.

At Clare Hall, Benjamin is accompanied by his wife, Katharina Boehm, Professor at the University of Passau (Germany)–a scholar of eighteenth-century British literature and culture. Katharina is based at Jesus College.