Associate ProfessorIsabelle Hesse

BA (Hons), MA (Canterbury, UK), PhD (York, UK);

SFHEA (Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, UK);

Mid-Career Research Lead, SACE (School of Art, Communication and English)

Isabelle Hesse is a comparative literature scholar based in English and Writing with specific expertise in Palestine/Israel and Holocaust studies as well as postcolonial literature and theory. She has widely published in these areas and their intersections. She is also interested in the cultural, political, and historical relationships between Europe and the Middle East. In September 2023, she was a Visiting Researcher at the Centre for Concurrences in Colonial and Postcolonial Studies at Linnaeus University, Sweden and in May and June 2022, she was a Visiting Fellow at the Parkes Insitute for the Study of Jewish/Non-Jewish Relations at the University of Southampton, UK.

Her current project examines the use of speculative fiction in settler-colonial contexts, including how speculative fiction can be used as a critical tool to examine the relationship between settler colonialism and climate change.

Her second monograph Reimagining Israel and Palestine in Contemporary British and German Culture (Edinburgh University Press, 2024) examines how British and German literature, TV drama, and film published and produced since the First Palestinian Intifada (1987-1993) have imagined Israel and Palestine. It argues that these works exemplify an important relational shift, which manifests itself on two levels: one, in representing Israeli and Palestinian histories and narratives as connected rather than separate, and two, by emphasising the links between the current situation in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories and the roles that the United Kingdom and Germany have played historically, and continue to play, in the region. This relational turn constitutes a significant shift in representations of Israel and Palestine in British and German culture as these depictions move beyond an engagement with the Holocaust and Jewish suffering at the expense of Palestinian suffering and indicate a willingness to represent and acknowledge British and German involvement in Israeli and Palestinian politics.

Her first book The Politics of Jewishness (Bloomsbury, 2016) addressed a significant shift in cultural perceptions of Jewishness by examining how the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine has extended ideas of Jewishness conflated with diaspora, marginality, victimhood, and the Holocaust. Through close analysis of literary productions from different geopolitical contexts - from post-war Germany to postcolonial writing to Palestine and Israel - this book demonstrates that constructions of Jewishness have taken a 'colonial' turn in the contemporary period, as world literature increasingly situates Jewishness in relation to Zionism and colonialism, positing Jewish identity as a means of questioning received ideas about victimhood and power. Listen to Isabelle speaking about the book here.