Sara Jones

Professor of Modern Languages and German Studies, University of Birmingham
Sara Jones completed her BA in Modern Languages (French and German) at the University of Bristol in 2003 and her MA and PhD in the Department of German at the University of Nottingham (2004-2008). After a year of teaching in the Department of European Studies at the University of Bath (2008-2009), she was awarded a 3-year Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship, the first two of which were held at the University of Bristol (2009-2011). She joined the University of Birmingham in September 2011 as a Birmingham Fellow, and was appointed cross-College to the Institute for German Studies (POLSIS) and the Department of Modern Languages. Since September 2018, she has held the post of Professor in the Department of Modern Languages.

Sara Jones’s doctoral research analysed literary production in the GDR and considered the complex and ambiguous position of socialist writers from across the spectrum of conformity and dissent. The thesis takes an interdisciplinary approach to the topic, combining extensive archival research with literary analysis of autobiographical texts and fiction. This work was published in 2011 as a monograph in de Gruyter’s Interdisciplinary German Cultural Studies series with the title: Complicity, Censorship and Criticism: Negotiating Space in the GDR Literary Sphere.

Professor Jones’s second major project, "Reconstructing the Stasi: Remembering Secret Police Repression in the United Germany", was funded by the Leverhulme Trust (2009-2012). This included a series of journal articles, book chapters, and conference papers that consider the representation of the Stasi in different media forms (literature, film, autobiography and museums). The research culminated in a monograph in Palgrave Macmillan's Memory Studies series with the title: The Media of Testimony: Remembering the East German Stasi in the Berlin Republic (August 2014). Professor Jones’s research takes an interdisciplinary approach to the processes of remembering dictatorship, combining cultural, media and memory studies with sociology and political science

Building on the work of her second monograph, Professor Jones was Principal Investigator for the AHRC network “Culture and its Uses of Testimony”, which ran from July 2016-January 2019. The network brought together scholars from across the humanities and social sciences with non-academic practitioners to consider what role cultural forms of testimony (e.g., autobiographical writing, literature, art, film, documentary and museums) can play in processes of post-conflict reconciliation and justice. For more information see the project website. The network led to a major AHRC-funded follow-on project “Testimony in Practice”, which runs from March 2019-February 2020. The project comprises: an innovative documentary theatre production, made in a collaboration with Catalan theatre company La Conquesta del Pol Sud and Romanian and German novelist Carmen-Francesca Banciu; an online testimonies campaign to collect the stories of Central and Eastern Europeans living in the UK; a co-operation with Central and Eastern European arts space, Centrala, to produce a sound-art installation based on the testimonies; and a series of workshops (youth artist, theatre practitioner, creative writing).

Professor Jones is CI on the major AHRC-funded research project “Knowing the Secret Police: Secrecy and Knowledge in East German Society”. This project overturns the approach of existing research to ask not what the "all-powerful" Stasi knew about society, but what and how East Germans knew about the secret police. It also includes a significant impact dimension working with political foundations, archives, museums and schools. Professor Jones will be CI on the bid (looking at literary networks and representations), the PI is Anselma Gallinat (Newcastle, looking at church and social networks) and Joanne Sayner (also Newcastle) is the second CI (looking at political networks). The project started in October 2018 and will run for three years.

Professor Jones is currently developing a new project looking at how memories of dictatorship are negotiated across borders in political, cultural and social processes. She is particularly interested in the concept of relationality and how this can inform our understanding of transnational co-operation. As part of this, she is working with techniques drawn from Social Network Analysis (SNA) to track cross-border collaborations of German memory-political institutions and combining this quantitative research with qualitative analysis to assess the meanings given to such co-operations by the actors involved and the ways in which these activities are used to construct new narratives about the past. Through the empirical work she is refining the new theoretical concept of “collaborative memory”. The final results of the research will be published in a monograph with the provisional title: Towards a Collaborative Memory: German Memory Work in a Transnational Context.