Karen Leeder (born 1962) [1] is a British writer, translator and scholar of German culture. [2] From 1993 she was Fellow of German at New College, Oxford and Professor of Modern German Literature in the University of Oxford. [3] In 2021 she was elected as Schwarz-Taylor Professor of the German Language and Literature, [4] a position she took up at The Queen's College, Oxford in 2022.
Born in Derbyshire, she lived in Rugby and attended Rugby High School and Rugby School. She studied German at Magdalen College, Oxford and the University of Hamburg.
She taught at Emmanuel College, Cambridge for three years as Official Fellow in German, from 1990 before taking up a post as a Fellow [5] at New College, Oxford in 1993. Her interests include post-war German literature, the literature of the GDR, German poetry, Brecht, Rilke, spectres and angels, translation.
From 1993 to 2022 she was Fellow in German at New College Oxford.[ citation needed ] In 2021 she was elected as Schwarz-Taylor Professor of the German Language and Literature, [4] a position she took up at The Queen's College, Oxford in 2022. In 2023 she embarked on a three-year Einstein fellowship at the Free University of Berlin on the project AfterWords. [6]
In 2017 she became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, [7] and in 2020 she was elected to the Academia Europaea. [8]
She is a translator, and she has won prizes for her translations of Volker Braun, Evelyn Schlag, Durs Grünbein and Ulrike Almut Sandig. [9] [ citation needed ] She has published widely on German culture, including several volumes on Rilke and Brecht. With Christopher Young and Michael Eskin, she was commissioning editor for the de Gruyter series of Companions to Contemporary German Culture (2012–2022).
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