Professor Sara Jones

• PhD in German 2009
• MA by Research (German) 2005
• BA in Modern Languages (French and German) 2003
• PCAP (Postgraduate Certificate in Academic Practice) 2013

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.

Professor Jones currently teaches on Core modules in German language and literature in Year 1 and Year 4. She also contributes to the MA module ‘World Literatures Compared.’ In previous years, she has contributed to Approaches to European Cultures (Year 1), Texts in Context (Year 1), Contemporary Germany (Year 1), Holocaust and Genocide: Comparative and Interdisciplinary Perspectives (MA) and was convenor for From the Stasi to the Sandmännchen: Remembering the GDR in the United Germany (Final Year). She also supervises undergraduate Independent Study Projects.

Professor Jones is always happy to hear from potential postgraduate students looking to work in the fields of the social and cultural history of state socialism, post-socialist memory practices, and interdisciplinary approaches to testimony and memory. She is especially interested in projects that take a transnational, comparative and cross-media approach.

Professor Jones currently supervises nine doctoral research projects:

Jonathan Conde (with Klaus Richter): An examination of Lithuanian nationalism

Vanessa Favali (with Isabel Wollaston): Investigating the use of dark tourist sites in UK secondary school Holocaust education

Sarra Ghersallah (with Anissa Daoudi): Constructing Arab Women’s Memory of Imprisonment through Testimony

George Gibson (with Corey Ross): Letters without signatures: An analysis of the anonymous letters written by citizens of the German Democratic Republic to the BBC German Service circa the construction of the Berlin Wall, 1960-1962

Tina Hofman (AHRC, with Charlotte Galpin): Representing Eastern Europe: Diversity, Inclusion and (De)coloniality in the UK Creative Economies

Johanna Kreft (AHRC, with Emanuelle Rodrigues Dos Santos and Jenny Wuestenberg (Nottingham Trent)): Beyond "colonial amnesia": Decolonising German Institutional Memory through Transformative Social Activism

Danielle Krikorian (with Deniz Soezen and Anissa Daoudi: Women Artists and Aesthetics in times of War (A Story of the other in Lebanon)

Mia Parkes (AHRC, with Mónica Jato and Alison Ribeiro de Menezes (Warwick)): Reconceptualising the Female Political Prisoner: 100 Years of Women's Imprisonment

Emily Stokes (Wolfson, with Camilla Smith): Watching the Boys: Paranoia, Stasi Surveillance, and Queer Visual Cultures in the German Democratic Republic, 1979-1990

Completed PhD Supervisions

Ilaria Bernardi (AHRC, with Charlotte Galpin): Visiting the United States and Bringing It Back Home: the US Exchange Programs with Germany and Italy, 1950-1965. Completed in 2022

Matthew Hines (Wolfson Foundation, with Ute Hirsekorn (Nottingham) and Mónica Jato): Writing a New Society: ‘Aufbau’ in East German Literature 1945-1955. Completed in 2023

Maren Rohe (DAAD, with Julian Pänke): Constructing the Other: Polish and Russian Perceptions of Germany between Media Influence and Individuality. Completed in 2019

Alexander Brown (AHRC, with Joanne Sayner): Rethinking the GDR Opposition: Reform, Resistance and Revolution in the Other Germany. Completed in 2019

Marlene Schrijnders (AHRC, with Joanne Sayner): From London to Leipzig and Back: Post-Punk, Endzeit and Ostgoth. Completed in 2019

David Zell (AHRC, with Joanne Sayner): Major Cultural Commemorations and the Construction of Cultural and Political Identity in the GDR, 1967-1987. Completed in 2018

Josefin Graef (DAAD, with Isabelle Hertner): The Dynamics of Narrating Criminal Violence: The National Socialist Underground and the (Re-) Negotiation of Germanness. Completed in 2016

Leila Mukhida (DAAD, with Elystan Griffiths): Politics and the Moving Image: Contemporary German and Austrian Cinema Through the Lens of Benjamin, Kracauer and Kluge. Completed in 2015

She has also supervised MA Dissertations in the MA Holocaust and Genocide, on representations of the GDR opposition in state-mandated memory, GDR samizdat publications, Romanian and Bulgarian immigration to the UK and Germany, and women’s prison writing in Franco’s Spain.

She is always happy to hear from potential postgraduate students looking to work in her areas of expertise.

Find out more - our PhD German Studies  page has information about doctoral research at the University of Birmingham.

Sara Jones’s core interests lie in the broad field of Memory Studies. She explores how societies remember and reconstruct their pasts as a cultural, social and political process. She has examined, in particular, first-person accounts in different (artistic) media, interview methodologies, transnational networks, and memory in migration. Her focus is on memories of twentieth-century dictatorships in the Europe’s East and their impact on the present.

Her recent projects include:

• “Post-Socialist Britain: Memory, Representation and Political Identity amongst German, Polish and Ukrainian Immigrants in the UK” (AHRC standard grant, Feb 2021 - Jan 2024). The project explores what happens to the connection between collective memory and political identity in the process of migration.
• Towards a Collaborative Memory: German Memory Work in a Transnational Context (published August 2022). The monograph explores how memories of dictatorship are negotiated across borders in political, cultural and social processes. It deploys concepts drawn from relational sociology and examines how these can inform our understanding of transnational co-operation.
• “Knowing the Secret Police: Secrecy and Knowledge in East German Society” (AHRC standard grant, May 2018-May 2022). 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.
• “Testimony in Practice” (AHRC follow-on funding for impact and engagement, March 2019-February 2020). The project comprises: an innovative documentary theatre production; an online testimonies campaign to collect the stories of migrants from Europe's East living in the UK; a sound-art installation based on the testimonies; and a series of practitioner workshops.
• “Culture and its Uses of Testimony” (AHRC research networking grant, 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.

Professor Jones has significant experience in cross-sector collaboration and has worked with artists, community organisations, NGOs, educators, and local government. This has included co-production of theatre, exhibitions, educational resources, and policy reports. Key examples are:

• Policy reports on the experiences of displaced Ukrainians in the UK: Support for Displaced Ukrainians (April 2023), and Effectiveness of Support for Displaced Ukrainians (March 2024, with Central and Eastern European arts space, Centrala, and Birmingham City Council).
• Photography workshops and exhibition in collaboration with Centrala, and artist Paulina Korobkiewicz.
• Report "In-Between Spaces" exploring the underrepresentation of art and artists from Europe's East in the UK's creative economies (with Jakub Ceglarz and Centrala).
• Resources for secondary teachers using testimony in the classroom across the curriculum (with Holocaust Educational Trust, Holocaust Memorial Day Trust, and National Holocaust Centre and Museum).
• 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.
• Co-operation with Centrala to produce a sound-art installation based on testimonies of migrants from Europe’s East.

Professor Jones is Deputy Director of Research/Impact and Engagement Lead for the College of Arts and Law. She has previously been Head of Postgraduate Research (2021-2023) and Deputy Head of Research/Impact Lead (2018-2021) for the School of Languages, Cultures, Art History and Music, and Research Lead for the Department of Modern Languages (2020-2021).

She is a member of the editorial board for Forum for Modern Language Studies, Memory Studies Review, and the Journal of Perpetrator Research.

Membership of Professional Organisations:

Association of German Studies in Great Britain and Ireland
Women in German Studies
Memory Studies Association