Kieran Howard

I am a German Studies PhD candidate funded by the White Rose College of the Arts & Humanities (WRoCAH). My research concerns German society’s confrontation with its colonial past. Specifically, I investigate representations of German colonialism in novels by Black German writers and authors from Germany’s former African colonies published since the 1980s. In doing so, I explore the shifting parameters and changing contours of Germany’s literary engagement with its colonial past.

My doctoral research builds on my MA dissertation on Sharon Dodua Otoo’s 2021 novel Adas Raum, which I interpreted both as a work of Afrofuturism and as a literary intervention into debates surrounding the then-newly opened Humboldt Forum in Berlin. In the context of this dissertation, I conducted an interview with Otoo.

I am also interested in representations of the past in museums. In 2022 I was awarded a Petrie Watson Exhibition by the University to investigate the memorialisation strategies at the Holocaust Memorial and the House of the Wannsee Conference. More recently, I have become interested in representations of the colonial past in German museums by organisations such as Dekoloniale.

Before moving to Sheffield in 2021 to begin my master’s study, I worked for three years as a Digital Marketing Executive in London.