Anna read German at Exeter College, Oxford, graduating in 1997. After a research year at the Herzog August Bibliothek, Wolfenbüttel, she returned to Oxford and completed a PhD on consolatory poetry at St John’s College. From 2002-2004 Anna held a position as a Junior Research Fellow at Christ Church, Oxford, and in 2004 she returned to London to take up a post in German at King’s. Between 2005 and 2008 she was on the steering committee for the AHRC-funded project ‘Representations of Women and Death in German Literature, Art and Media after 1500’. Between 2015 and 2021 she was Co-Director of the newly-founded Centre for Early Modern Studies. She is currently Co-Investigator on an AHRC-funded project on Multilingual Early Modern London (1547-1714).

Research interests and PhD supervision

• German literature and culture from the late fifteenth to the early eighteenth centuries
• The German Reformation
• Intellectual, religious and literary networks
• Book history
• Biblical and classical reception in German texts

Anna’s research focuses primarily on the early modern period, although her work has also taken in other periods. She has often worked across disciplinary boundaries, with projects which also have a historical and/or theological focus. She has published on early modern consolatory poetry, Reformation-era authors, including Hans Sachs and Philipp Melanchthon, seventeenth-century authors (Georg Rodolf Weckherlin, Quirinus Kuhlmann and Christian Weise), and on Anglo-German connections. She is currently writing a monograph on German writers in Stuart London, for which she was awarded a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship.

Teaching

Anna's teaching covers both German language and literature from the sixteenth to twentieth centuries. Modules include translation from and into German, as well as introductory modules on modern German literature, the German Reformation; literature and culture of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; early modern women; nineteenth and twentieth century literature; book history; and travel writing.

Expertise and public engagement

In 2017 Anna collaborated with the British Library on an exhibition on the Reformation as a textual event, held to mark the 500th anniversary of Luther’s 95 theses. She has also worked with the Lutheran church of St Anne’s, on a Reformation event in 2017 and as part of Open House London in 2018, and in 2025 she collaborated with St Mary’s German church for the University of London Being Human Festival, speaking about the ‘Poor Palatine’ German migration of 1709-10. This topic also features in a forthcoming podcast as part of the Multilingual Early Modern London project. Anna has also been involved with several of the Taylor digital editions of Reformation pamphlets and texts, a project run by the University of Oxford.

Selected publications

• The Gunpowder Plot in Early Modern German Texts. Linton, A., 1 Jul 2022, In: Modern Language Review. 117, 3, p. 434-455
• From Reformation Wittenberg to Civil War Oxford: A Humanist Bible in the Fellows’ Library of Jesus College, Oxford. Linton, A., 2022, In: OXFORD GERMAN STUDIES. 51, 1, p. 3-32 30
• Hans Sachs’s Reformation broadsheets: landscapes, cityscapes, dreamscapes. Linton, A., 14 Nov 2017, In: Past and Present. 234, 12, p. 237–261
• Millenarianism in Bromley-by-Bow: Quirinus Kuhlmann and the Stuarts. Linton, A., Jul 2016, In: German Life and Letters. 69, 3, p. 285-301 17 
• Poetry and Parental Bereavement in Early Modern Lutheran Germany. Linton, A., 2008, Oxford: Oxford University Press.