BRIGITTE JIRKU

Brigitte Jirku is a Professor of German Literature at the University of Valencia. She completed her studies at various universities in the US. In the last twenty years, she has carried out numerous research stays at German universities. Her collaboration with the Elfriede Jelinek Forschungszentrum (Universität Wien) and with the Johannes Gutenberg Universtät-Mainz within the European network “Reading violence” are especially noteworthy. Her recent research has centred on the study of gender discourses in relation to power and violence discourses in German-language literature. Moreover, her work on literary spaces that explore memories of collective and individual violence has led her to analyse the victim-perpetrator paradigm and its redefinition –with a special emphasis on the complexity of the figure of the perpetrator—in contemporary German-language literary texts.

In addition, she is the co-editor of the collection “Signatures of Violence. Studies in Literature and Media” (Peter Lang) and author and co-editor of various publications on the representation of violence in literature and media (in 2018: Visualisierungen von Gewalt y Literarisierungen von Gewalt, con Dagmar von Hoff y Lena Wetenkamp).