Dr Natalie Diebschlag

Biography

Natalie joined the Modern Language Centre at King’s College London in 2016 as a German tutor and became Deputy Team Leader in 2017. She has taught German as a foreign language across all levels at various universities in the UK for more than 10 years. In higher levels, she is particularly interested in teaching German current affairs, history, art, film, literature and philosophy while her pedagogical approach at lower levels is informed by interactive, playful activities. She graduated from RWTH Aachen University with a Magister Artium in English Literature, Linguistics and History in 2004 and from the University of Leeds with a PhD in postcolonial literature and critical theory in 2011. She has also lectured literary theory and English literature at the University of Bradford and French at the University of York. Natalie has worked as a full-time in-house translator for a major translation service and been involved in various academic translation projects. In her free-time she likes to volunteer for human rights and animal rights charities. Natalie’s doctoral research offered a parallel reading of the works of Canadian-Sri Lankan author Michael Ondaatje and Jacques Derrida. Focusing on the development of deconstruction from Of Grammatology to Derrida’s expressly political writings in Spectres of Marx, The Animal that Therefore I am and Rogues, the thesis offered an analysis of the two writers’ similar writing strategies and made a case for the inherently ethical nature of poetic innovation. Natalie’s postdoctoral research interests included Derridean readings of contemporary British cinema, cosmopolitanism and posthuman ethics.

Publications

• “Inventing London: Derrida’s legacies in Sally Potter’s Yes and Anthony Minghella’s Breaking and Entering” (Derrida Today 10 (1):89-109.)
• “Jazzing the Novel: the Derridean ethics of Michael Ondaatje’s Coming through Slaughter” (Mosaic 49 (1): 161-178)
• “The city of refuge: deconstructing cosmopolitanism in Anthony Minghella's Breaking and Entering”, (Journal of Postcolonial Writing, December 2014: 48-58)
• “Spectral encounters: Divisadero and the ethics of reading”, (Moving Worlds: A Journal of Transcultural Writings, 10.2., Michael Ondaatje: Critical Perspectives: 100-110)
• “Reading Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient in light of Roland Barthes' 'The Death of the Author'”, (Visions of Canada – Visions du Canada, Canadian Studies in Europe, Vol. 6 (2007), 189-206.)
• Review of A Fish Trapped Inside the Wind by Christien Gholsen, (Moving Worlds: A Journal of Transcultural Writings, 12.1, (Con) figuring Sport: 108-9)
• Review of India and the Diasporic Imagination/L'Inde et l'Imagination Diasporique, (Moving Worlds: A Journal of Transcultural Writings, 11.2, Postcolonial Europe: 114-115.)
• Review of Yes (Sally Potter, 2004), The James Joyce Broadsheet, Autumn 2011
• PEN International Annual Report, English – German translation, 2012