Christina Spittel

Dr Christina Spittel serves as Senior Lecturer in English and Media Studies and Postgraduate Research Coordinator in the School of Humanities & Social Sciences at UNSW Canberra, University of New South Wales. She holds a PhD from the University of Freiburg and a Staatsexamen undergraduate degree from the University of Tübingen. Her research focuses on the intersections between literature, history, memory, and politics, including Australian war writing, the teaching of Shakespeare in the Third Reich and socialist East Germany, and the reception of Australian literature behind the Berlin Wall. Current projects encompass her forthcoming book Based on a true Story: The First World War in the Australian Novel, under contract with Sydney University Press, which traces Australian novelists' engagement with the Great War from 1914 to the centenary. She leads an Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA) project (DE180101150) on Seven Seas’ English-language paperbacks and the Cold War bookshelf. Additional initiatives include the AHRC-funded Teaching and Learning War Network and a DAAD-funded collaboration with Free University Berlin on transnational cultures of First World War remembrance.

Spittel co-edited Australian Literature in the German Democratic Republic: Reading through the Iron Curtain (Anthem, London, 2016) with Nicole Moore and has published key works such as “A Portable Monument?: Leonard Mann's Flesh in Armour and Australia's Memory of the First World War” (Book History, 2011), “'War's just one black foulness': Jack Lindsay's The Blood Vote and the orthodoxies of Anzac” (Australian Literary Studies, 2015), “The One Day of the Year and All That: Anzac between History and Memory” (Australian Journal of Politics and History, 2012, with Martin Crotty), and “'So homesick for Anzac'? Australian novelists and the shifting cartographies of Gallipoli” (2017). She received the 2016 Vice-Chancellor's Award for Teaching Excellence, convenes courses including ZHSS8106 War & Memory and ZHSS8125 Strategic Communication, supervises PhD theses on First World War troopship magazines and social media in Philippine democracy, acts as ACT representative for the Association for the Study of Australian Literature, and serves on the advisory board of the Teaching and Learning War network. Spittel has contributed to ABC Radio National and television discussions on First World War literature.