Univ.-Prof. Dr. Julia Hoydis
Professor of English Literary Studies from the 18th to the 21st Century
Julia Hoydis works in in the field of Anglophone literary and cultural studies (British and postcolonial literatures); in September 2024 she took up the post as Full Professor of English Literature from the 18th to the 21st Century at the Department of English Studies at the University of Graz.
Previously, she was Professor of English Literature at the University of Klagenfurt (2023-2024) and Associate Director and Academic Coordinator of the Centre for Multidisciplinary Environmental Studies in the Humanities (MESH) at the University of Cologne (2022-2023). She has also taught at the Universities of Duisburg-Essen, Cologne and Cambridge (Murray Edwards College).
Hoydis studied English Philology, Media Studies and Philosophy at the University of Cologne. In 2010, she completed her doctorate summa cum laude in the field of postcolonial studies with a thesis on ethics and storytelling in the work of Indian author Amitav Ghosh. For her habilitation thesis entitled ‘Risk and the English Novel. From Defoe to McEwan’ she was awared the venia legendi for English Literature and Cultural studies in 2018 (University of Cologne). Since 2019, she has been editor of the open access journal Anglistik: International Journal of English Studies.
Her research interests include the history and development of the English novel (from the 18th century to the present day), narratology, literature and science, posthumanism and digital narrative forms (including literature and AI), postcolonial studies and ecocriticism/environmental humanities. She is currently researching climate change narratives in particular, including in the FWF-funded joint project ‘Just Futures? An Interdisciplinary Approach to Cultural Climate Models’ (2023-2026), which she is co-leading with David Higgins (University of Leeds) and which deals with questions of intergenerational justice and ideas of climate futures in various media. Previously, she was Principal Investigator of the project ‘Climate Change Literacy’ (Volkswagen Foundation, 2021-2023).