Rate My Professor Ellen Pilsworth

Dr Ellen Pilsworth is Associate Professor in German and Translation Studies in the Department of Languages and Cultures at the University of Reading. She earned a BA (Hons) in English and German from the University of Oxford, where she also spent a year as a DAAD Scholar at Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg researching Romantic authors and German nationalism. She holds an MPhil in Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic from the University of Cambridge and a PhD in German Studies from University College London, focusing on late eighteenth-century German poetry responses to major wars. After serving as Teaching Fellow at the University of Bristol, she joined the University of Reading as Lecturer around 2018, advancing to Associate Professor. She is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, management board member of the Centre for Book Cultures and Publishing, and Associate Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.

Pilsworth's research specializes in German literature and culture from the eighteenth and twentieth centuries, encompassing nationalism, war poetry, anti-fascist publishing, memory cultures, exile literature, and British refugee histories. Her UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship, awarded nearly £2 million starting November 2025, funds the four-year ‘Nation of Refuge’ project examining British responses to asylum seekers over the past century, including attitudes to small boat arrivals. Previously, her British Academy and Wolfson Foundation fellowship (2020-2024) supported ‘Knowing the Nazis, Inside and Out: Anti-Fascist Publishing in Austria, Germany and Britain, 1927-1940’. Additional honors include the Martin Miller and Hannah Norbert-Miller Fellowship (2023) and Alfred Landecker Membership at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study (2024-2025). Key publications feature her forthcoming monograph Hitler’s Victims: Refugee Memoirs of Nazi Persecution for British Readers during Appeasement and War (Berghahn Books), co-edited Nationalism before the Nation State (Brill, 2020), and articles such as ‘I could have slapped myself’: The Ethics of the Bystander Perspective in Sebastian Haffner’s Memoir (Journal of Perpetrator Research, 2023), Four responses to Nazism (Journal of the British Academy, 2021), and Romantic Nationalism or Romantic Retreat? Re-evaluating the Politics of Arnim and Brentano’s Des Knaben Wunderhorn (German Life and Letters, 2021). Her scholarship illuminates ordinary British perceptions of Nazism and informs contemporary refugee discourses.