Dr Joanna Rzepa

Biography

I am a Senior Lecturer in Literature in the Department of Literature, Film, and Theatre Studies. Before joining Essex, I held the post of Thomas Brown Assistant Professor in the School of Languages, Literatures and Cultural Studies, Trinity College Dublin. Before that, I was an Irish Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow at the Trinity Long Room Hub, Arts & Humanities Research Institute, and an early career fellow at the Warwick Institute of Advanced Study. I also taught at the University of Warwick and University College London. I am a comparatist and a literary historian, and I teach and supervise on a wide range of topics in twentieth and twenty-first century literary cultures. My research focuses on Holocaust writing and testimony, book and publishing history, print culture and politics, and translation history. I also have a long-standing interest in modernism and cultural and intellectual history. My current project, which is supported by the Leverhulme Trust Research Fellowship (2025-26), is situated at the juncture of Holocaust studies, publishing history, and translation studies. It investigates the transnational dissemination of testimonies originating in Poland by foregrounding the role of publishers and translators who made it possible for survivors’ narratives to reach global readership through English-language translations. It examines how the changing nature of the literary marketplace, translation practice, and politics have shaped the publishing of Holocaust writing from World War 2 until the present day. My first monograph, "Modernism and Theology: Rainer Maria Rilke, T. S. Eliot, Czesław Miłosz" (Palgrave Macmillan 2021), is the first book-length study to examine the interface between literary and theological modernisms. It provides a comprehensive account of literary responses to the modernist crisis in theology from a transnational and interdenominational perspective. It offers a cultural history of the period, considering a wide range of literary and historical sources, including novels, drama, poetry, literary criticism, encyclicals, theological and philosophical treatises, periodical publications, and wartime propaganda. By contextualising literary modernism within the cultural, religious, and political landscape, the book reveals fundamental yet largely forgotten connections between literary and theological modernisms. My research has been published in 'Modernism/modernity', 'Comparative Critical Studies', 'Translation Studies', and other leading journals. In 2020, I won the Martha Cheung Award for Best English Article in Translation Studies by an Early Career Scholar funded by the Baker Centre for Translation and Intercultural Studies, Shanghai International Studies University, for my article on the translations of Jan Karski's 'Story of a Secret State' (published in 'Translation Studies', 11.3). I welcome PhD applications in the following areas: • modernism, twentieth- and twenty-first-century literature • comparative literature • twentieth-century book history and print culture • Holocaust writing • literature and religion • literary translation

Qualifications

• PhD in English and Comparative Literary Studies University of Warwick,

Appointments

University of Essex

• Ethics Officer, Department of Literature, Film, and Theatre Studies, University of Essex (1/2025 - 9/2025)

• Athena Swan Lead (Bronze Award), Department of Literature, Film, and Theatre Studies, University of Essex (2019 - 2023)

• Director of Education, Department of Literature, Film, and Theatre Studies, University of Essex (1/2022 - 4/2022)

• Senior Lecturer in Literature, Department of Literature, Film, and Theatre Studies, University of Essex (10/2021 - present)

• Director of Literature, Department of Literature, Film, and Theatre Studies, University of Essex (2021 - 2022)

• Departmental Disability Liaison Officer, Department of Literature, Film, and Theatre Studies, University of Essex (2020 - 2021)

• Lecturer in Literature, Department of Literature, Film, and Theatre Studies, University of Essex (1/1/2019 - 30/9/2021)

Other academic

• Thomas Brown Assistant Professor, School of Languages, Literatures and Cultural Studies, Trinity College Dublin (2017 - 2018)

• Irish Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow, Trinity Long Room Hub: Arts and Humanities Research Institute, Trinity College Dublin (2016 - 2017)

• Early Career Fellow, Institute of Advanced Study, University of Warwick (2015 - 2016)