Another successful dissertation defense in Modern History

Martina Kerlová successfully defended her dissertation, Erich Heller and Bohemian Jewish Exiles in Anglo-American Academia, in Modern History at the end of last year. Her project examines the life and work of Erich Heller, a literary critic and scholar of Austrian and German literature and philosophy. Born into a German-Jewish family in the borderlands of Habsburg Bohemia, Heller graduated from the German University in Prague but was forced to flee following the Nazi invasion. He found refuge in Great Britain before eventually moving to the United States, where he taught for two decades at Northwestern University.

Martina's dissertation explores Heller's intellectual development through his voluntary and forced migrations, placing his life and thought in the context of his generation of Bohemian-born émigrés who became influential in exile and postwar American academia. Her study makes an important contribution to the scholarship on German-speaking anti-fascist exiles from Czechoslovakia.

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Photo: © Gonville & Caius College, Cambridge