The prize is awarded annually to a female or non-binary postgraduate researcher for an outstanding essay on a topic relating to German Studies. Annegret’s essay, entitled ‘Voicing Vulnerability: Mediating Violence, Victimisation, and Female Subjectivity in Nora Gomringer’s Monster Poetry’, has been selected by the judges to receive this year’s prize. The essay examines poetic works by the Swiss-German performance poet Nora-Eugenie Gomringer that engage with experiences of vulnerable subjects, that is, those that have experienced harm or violence, or are considered especially open to these.

The judges described Annegret’s essay as ‘genuinely exciting’, noting that it ‘offers a new lens’ on the ‘key feminist issues of vulnerability and violence’. They went on to praise the essay’s ‘sophisticated use of feminist psychoanalytic, new materialist feminist and intermediality theory’, as well as the ‘rich and illuminating close reading that serves to expand and develop these theories’.

Annegret was invited to the annual Women in German Studies conference in Leeds to receive her prize of £100, and her essay is now being peer-reviewed for publication in the journal German Life and Letters.

Annegret is registered on the joint-PhD programme between King’s College London and the Humboldt University Berlin. Her doctoral dissertation focuses on ‘monstrous figurations’ in contemporary, experimental German-language writing, reading these as attempts to transform established notions of the human subject and current knowledge formations that are associated with crisis. Her research is funded by the London Arts and Humanities Partnership and supervised by Dr Áine McMurtry and Professor Iris Därmann.