Tom Smith

I started in St Andrews in 2017, having previously taught at Newcastle University, University College London, and Worcester College and Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford. My research interests are:

• post-war and contemporary German literature and culture
• music (classical and popular, especially electronic) in German culture
• German film and television
• gender and queer studies
• decolonial approaches to teaching and research
• the culture of East Germany

I am happy to discuss supervision of doctoral work on any of these areas.

My current project explores queer of colour perspectives on Germany’s club scene from the late 1980s. I am working with a range of sources, from electronic music, photography and club promotional material to magazines, literature and film. The first stage of the project was funded by a Research Incentive Grant from the Carnegie Trust, entitled Afrogermanic? Cultural Exchange and Racial Difference in the Aesthetic Products of the Early Techno Scenes in Detroit and Berlin. I was selected as one of the AHRC/BBC New Generation Thinkers in 2019. I presented some of my work on BBC Radio 3’s Free Thinking and The Essay – listen here to my piece on race in techno's origins in Detroit and Berlin.

With Nicola Thomas, Rey Conquer and Richard McClelland, I co-founded an online resource dedicated to diversity and decolonising in German Studies called EGS - towards an Equitable German Studies. It features a bibliography of texts and films, and a blog. Please get in touch if you’d like to contribute!

My book, Comrades in Arms: Military Masculinities in East German Culture, appeared in February 2020 with Berghahn Books, and is available to download as an open-access e-book. I presented some of my ideas from the book as an Essay on BBC Radio 3 – listen to it on BBC web site.

Contemporary German film, TV and literature; East Germany; music in German culture; masculinities; queer studies