Staff profile

I joined Durham as Assistant Professor in Literature and Drama in September 2022. I trained and worked as a theatre director in Germany before completing a BA in English and Comparative Literature at Goldsmiths (University of London), followed by an MSt in English Literature (1830–1914) and an AHRC-funded DPhil at the University of Oxford. Before joining Durham, I have held positions as a college lecturer in Victorian and Modern Literature at the University of Oxford, as associate lecturer in Comparative Literature at Goldsmiths, and as Assistant Professor in English Literature at the University of Regensburg, where I have taught contemporary British Drama.

Drama, in word and practice, presents a particular focus of interest in my research. My current research investigates the ways in which contemporary plays authored by women could be considered laboratories for contemporary feminist theory and activism.

Previous research encompassed Victorian and Modern literatures with a focus on theories of transnationalism and the political application of aesthetics. My monograph ‘The Indispensable East’: Literary Decadence and Orientalism in England and Germany, 1880−1920, (under contract with Oxford University Press) draws upon theoretical models of orientalism and cosmopolitanism to assess the significance of relating to and embodying 'otherness' in Decadent writing.

• Drama
• Theatre and Performance Theory/Practice
• Decadence
• Literature in (medial) translation
• Gender Studies and Feminism
• Literary Theory
• Transnational Modernism/The long nineteenth Century

Chapter in book

• Herold, Katharina (2021). Germany: Decadence from the Wilhelmine Empire to the Weimar Republic. In The Oxford Handbook of Decadence.
• Herold, Katharina (2019). Socio-aesthetic Histories: Vienna 1900 and Weimar Berlin. In Decadence and Literature. 283-99.
• Herold, Katharina (2018). “Against Civilisation” Symons, the Gypsy Lore, and Politicised Aestheticism. In Arthur Symons. 145-59.
• Herold, Katharina (2017). 'Dancing the Image: Sensoriality and Kinesthetics in the Poetry of Stephane Mallarmé and Arthur Symons’. In Decadence and the Senses. 141-61.

Edited book

• Herold, Katharina & Krause, Frank (2021). Smell and Social Life: Aspects of English, French and German Literature (1880–1939). LONDON GERMAN STUDIES XVII. iudicium.

Edited Journal

• Herold, Katharina & Barrera-Medrano, Leire (2019). Women Writing Decadence. Volupté Interdisciplinary Journal of Decadence Studies, 2 (1): London: Goldsmiths University of London.

Journal Article

• Herold-Zanker, Katharina (2021). Intermediality and Decadent Performance in Anita Berber and Sebastian Droste’s Die Tänze des Lasters, des Grauens und der Ekstase (1923). Volupté Interdisciplinary Journal of Decadence Studies 4(2): 64–88.
• Herold, Katharina (2021). Allegories on the international scene: Vernon Lee’s, Mina Loy’s, and Else Lasker-Schüler’s war plays. Feminist Modernist Studies 4(2): 203-21.