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20 November 2019

PhD student Yejun Zou wins 2019 Women in German Studies Book Prize

Congratulations to Yejun Zou in the Department of German who is the winner of this year’s Women in German Studies Book Prize.

PhD student Yejun Zou wins 2019 Women in German Studies Book Prize
PhD student Yejun Zou wins 2019 Women in German Studies Book Prize

Yejun Zou, a final-year PhD student in the Department of German at King’s, has won the 2019 Women in German Studies Book Prize.

The prize, which is sponsored by Peter Lang Oxford, is awarded annually to a female early career scholar in German Studies who is preparing her first book for publication. Entrants are invited to submit a book proposal and sample chapter to the judging panel.

This year’s prestigious competition has been won by Yejun for her research entitled Socialist Transnationality and Feminist Imaginaries in Modern German and Chinese Literature: Christa Wolf and Ding Ling. Judges noted that this is ‘an exciting project’ with ‘the potential to make a genuine contribution to several fields – comparative literature, feminist and socialist scholarship, as well as German studies, within which Christa Wolf is a major figure’.

Yejun was invited to the annual Women in German Studies conference in Dublin to receive her prize of £150, and her book is now being peer-reviewed for publication in Peter Lang’s Transnational Cultures series.

Yejun is registered on the joint-PhD programme between King’s College London and the Humboldt University Berlin. Her research is funded by a King’s International Scholarship and supervised by Dr Catherine Smale (King’s) and Professor Birgit Dahlke (Humboldt), with advice from Dr Anup Grewal (Toronto). In winning this competition, Yejun follows in the footsteps of another PhD student from the Department of German, Iga Nowicz, who was awarded the 2018 Women in German Studies Book Prize.

(Aug 2022 - The Department of German now the Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures).