Ms Claire Hyland
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Room: 2.77, 21 Woodland Road
Email: Claire.Hyland@bristol.ac.uk
Research Interests
Claire Hyland studied European Studies with German and French at the University of Bath and went on to do an MA in Modern and Contemporary German Studies at the University of Nottingham. She returned to the University of Bath in 2007 to carry out the research for her PhD, which explores how East Germans born in the 1970s negotiate and understand their identities in contemporary Germany. The study draws on a series on interviews with members of this generation which focused on the themes of Ostalgie, consumer attitudes and perceptions of capitalism. She has presented papers and published texts on the key findings of the project. Claire joined the University of Bristol as a Teaching Fellow in 2011 and is currently working on a collaborative research project, entitled ‘Eyewitnesses of State Socialism: Memories of living in the former Eastern Bloc’. The project focuses on how post-socialist communities in Bristol and the surrounding areas remember their state socialist pasts, and the ways that these memories feed into their perceptions of capitalism in the UK.
Teaching
Claire Hyland’s teaching focuses on the former German Democratic Republic and East German identity since the fall of the Wall. She focuses primarily on post-unification perceptions of the GDR, exploring how the East is constructed through different narratives of memory in contemporary German. She also draws on film and literature from the GDR as a way of understanding the cultural history of the former socialist state. In addition she teaches on the integrated skills language course.
Claire teaches the following courses:
- GERM10013/23 Introduction to German Studies
- GERM29008 Cultural History of the GDR
- GERM32062 Reconstructing the Stasi
- GERM20001 Integrated Skills
Publications
Hyland, C. (2012) ‘Ostalgie doesn’t fit’: Individual interpretations of and interaction with Ostalgie’, in Saunders A. and Pinfold, D. (eds.), After the Wall: Remembering and Rethinking the GDR – Multiple Perspectives and Plural Authenticities, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan (forthcoming).
Hyland, C. (2011) ‘“The Era Has Passed, But It’s Nice to Remember”: Eastern Identifications with the GDR Past and Unified Germany’, in Clarke, D. and Wölfel, U. (eds.), Twenty Years After: Remembering the German Democratic Republic (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan), pp. 144-156 (in print).