Thomas Wilks

DISCLAIMER: Publication data on this site, where imported from the ORCiD database, is currently being edited for accuracy. Please note that the headline statistics do not yet account accurately for my translations and my publications in progress due to discrepancies between Pure and ORCiD. Pure assumes that all of my outputs are physical or digital publications and that where my status should be translator that I am a co-author. My ORCiD listing, https://orcid.org/0009-0005-1884-1347 , is more accurate: but details of my unpublished conference papers, published teaching resources, public engagement activities and my teaching over 24 years in languages, literature and cultural studies are all still being added manually to both this Pure site and ORCiD. The automated indication that I currently have a Full-Time Equivalent position of '0' is also inaccurate but I cannot change it to '1'. [End of Disclaimer]

Dr Thomas Wilks specialises in modern and contemporary cultural studies, especially literature and translation, in German, French and English. He joined the University of Galway in 2023. His research interests are in literary treatments of human and built environments at their intersections with self-scrutiny, wellbeing and translatability. He published the first monograph comparing the transcultural interdisciplinarians Michel Leiris and Hubert Fichte. His subsequent publications and presentations investigate cultural transfers and explain distinctions of German environments to international readers. He has contributed to interdisciplinary research networks on theatre translation and medical inhumanities, which resulted in chapters in edited volumes. His other publications include study guides with self-assessment activities for international distance learners on post-1945 German literature and drama, as well as entries for the digital Literary Encyclopedia and reviews of up to article length for refereed journals. In addition to the publications listed here, an article on ‘The English Zwischenwelt of Thomas Glavinic’s Die Arbeit der Nacht’ is due to be published later in 2025.

German Literature, Comparative Literature, French Literature, German Cultural Studies, Comparative Cultural Studies, Translation Studies (theory, practice, localisation and adaptation), Distraction, Environmental Studies (especially built and human environments at their intersections with wellbeing), Medical Humanities, Autobiography (theory, practice)

Current Research Activities:
Tom Wilks is currently working on two major projects: on Recasting Distraction in Literature: Environments, Language, Effects; and on Experiencing Social Environments: Narration as Translation. The first of these projects, a monograph, investigates how distraction is signified differently in communicative and physical settings that have not been compared in monodisciplinary scholarship to date. He is developing theories and literary case studies of awareness and post-attentional processing in environmentally influenced identity formation and negotiation. His recent German option module teaching at Galway for second and final years informs and is informed by this research. His second project investigates how cultural environments are shaped by language usage, where register, variety and idiolect each contribute to identity, and by mediation, ranging across narrative, documentary, written and oral modes. He evaluates the extent to which local, regional and national factors influence the identities bestowed on institutions by determining how the literacies involved in the production and reception of texts characterise these shapings. His recent Advanced German Language MA teaching and his paper to the 2024 SLLC Research Day on International Encounters inform and are informed by this project.

Scholarly Contributions and Career:
In addition to extensive teaching of German language, literature and translation alongside his active research, Tom is currently Programme Co-Ordinator for the B.Commerce with German at the University of Galway. Previously, at Queen Mary University of London, he was School and Departmental Careers Lead and was the Departmental Library Lead and Staff-Student Liaison Committee Lead and Co-Chair. His contributions to the institution-wide Graduate Attributes workstream earned him a QMUL Education Award (2022). He was also involved in the design and development of BA Liberal Arts at QMUL, for which he was awarded a Performance Bonus in 2022, having been Scheme Leader for Liberal Arts in its first year of operation at Aberystwyth University, where he was also Lecturer in German (2017-18). Tom also taught and examined German language and translation as well as German and European literature at University College London; German literature, history and cinema at the University of Reading; French and German drama at the University of York; and English for Academic Purposes to incoming international postgraduates at the University of Southampton and to incoming undergraduates and postgraduates at Royal Holloway, where he had previously completed his BA, MA and PhD and had taught in the then separate Departments of French and German. Between 2003 and 2012, he was Lecturer in English at the Universities of Würzburg, Mainz and Braunschweig. He has also worked as translation advisor and voiceover artist for Volkswagen TV in Wolfsburg; as translator into English of German academic and professional material, including a double-length monograph on Cultural Narratology; and as an English language tutor and examiner for two language schools. He has transcribed several sets of notes on previously unpublished lectures by C.G. Jung for the ongoing definitive edition of Jung's work.

My teaching interests are wide. Among these are:

German Language: at all levels (Beginners to Advanced), for general and applied courses.

German Literature: modern in the broadest sense, covering an increasing volume and specialisation of content through the last 150 years, but more often thematically than chronologically. My most recent modules for Galway are on Distraction in German Literature at its intersections with medical humanities. Cultural and built environments have been a frequent theme of my teaching, for example in modules on Berlin, sometimes with an Area Studies or historico-cultural focus. German cinema is a frequent point of comparison, also featuring strongly in my teaching, especially on Literaturverfilmungen (adaptations of German literature).

Translation: especially from German into English in recent years, including in collaborative workshops with contemporary German authors. Also in MA teaching on Professional Translation and related discourse analysis; and on Translation Theory and Criticism.

Comparative Literature and Comparative Cultural Studies: especially involving content in German, French and English. Where I have taught using English translations, I have concentrated on translation challenges and opportunities, thus highlighting stylistics and localisation as points of comparison. Modules that I have designed and/or developed have been chosen enthusiastically by students of Film and Linguistics, among other arts and social science programmes. Themes on which I have developed and taught research-led modules include: Migration; Autobiography (childhood; and autobiography beyond self-identity); Metropolitan Environments; Gender; and Poetry (sound, shape and sense). 

Core courses in academic communication skills, interdisciplinarity (history of ideas for Liberal Arts) and -- broadly -- language awareness (including specific components of sociolinguistics and discourse analysis) have also been within my remit, sometimes as Convenor, including for multi-programme, School-wide modules, for which I have lectured to larger groups than are typical in Modern Foreign Languages alone. The subject knowledge, teaching approaches and appreciation of student interests and aptitudes that I have gained from these strands of my teaching also motivate me strongly in pitching my research as widely as I can.

In previous appointments, I have taught (with no less interest than on all of the above) on French Literature, French Language, modern French Cultural Studies, English Literature, English Language (ranging from English as a Foreign Language at most levels of proficiency to English for Media Studies to Creative Writing) and British Cultural Studies (interesting in the German university context of this teaching for the plurality and interdisciplinarity of 'cultural').