Portrait and Research Interests

 Dr. Martin Mühlheim

• Overview
• Teaching: Bachelor & Master
• Teaching: Further Education
• Bibliography
• Project Sites
  • Liberian Literature Project
  • Switzerland in Irish Poetry
  • Zurich in Anglophone Literatures

Martin Mühlheim teaches English Literature at the University of Zurich (UZH). His research interests include narrative fiction and narratology, intertextuality and genre, and the concepts of collective memory, shame, and identity. He is particularly interested in how gender, ethnicity, and class intersect in literary texts, i.e. in the question how politics and ideology relate to (and are shaped by) fictional texts. Further interests include the theory of adaptation, the concepts of irony and metafiction, the history of depth psychology, (post-)colonialism, and quantitative formalism (i.e. distant reading).

Since he started working in the UZH English Department in the fall of 2004, Martin Mühlheim has taught Bachelor and Master courses on narrative fiction, drama, and a range of other topics. In addition, he has participated actively in several intra-departmental task groups involved in implementing the English Department's new Bachelor and Master curricula. He was also a member of the organizing committee of Legacies, a conference held at the English Department on September 28, 2007, and the Peer Mentoring Group "Genius for Hire," which organized a series of prestigious guest lectures in 2010 and 2011. His PhD thesis, "Fictions of Home: Narratives of Alienation and Belonging, 1850-2000," was submitted in December 2013 and published in book form in 2018.

Martin Mühlheim has (co-)taught several further education courses for Gymnasium teachers. He is a founding member and coordinator of the Swiss Centre for Irish Studies (SCIS)
 and, since October 2024, the general manager of the Zurich James Joyce Foundation.

(a) Current

• an essay on Ralph Ellison's "Mister Toussan" (with Adina Krieger);
• a survey article on Liberian Literature;
• an edition of the works of the Liberian author Kona Khasu;
• the Liberian Literature Project;
• a graphic novel on Roger Casement (with Neil O'Driscoll).

(b) Long-Term

• an introduction to the study of narrative fiction;
• a theoretical critique of some key Jungian concepts (from a left-wing perspective);
• a comparative analysis of three plays dealing with the relationship between Sigmund Freud, C. G. Jung, and Sabina Spielrein;
• an essay on Guy Endore's Babouk;
• a Marxist analysis of Oscar Wilde's "The Nightingale and the Rose";
• an essay on a comics adaptation of Oscar Wilde's "The Nightingale and the Rose";
• a book-length study with the working title "Signs of Upheaval: Literature and Revolution."

• since May 2019: The Swiss Centre of Irish Studies @ the Zurich James Joyce Foundation (co-founder and coordinator)
• since April 2015: SAUTE: Swiss Association of University Teachers of English (currently serving as secretary)

• Coordinator of UZH Alumni English Studies
• Member of the selection committee for the Yeats Summer School Stipend
• Expert for Lehrdiplom exam lessons in the field of English
• Project coordinator for the English Department's contribution to a strategisches Lehrkredit project by the UZH Hochschuldidaktik.

• 2015-2018: Expert for Matura exams in the field of English, Canton of Schwyz