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PhD Title: Race for Hitler’s Loathsome Cause: An intellectual history of the political, theological and racial intersectionalities of Gerhard Kittel’s antisemitism.

 

Shortly after Hitler seized power in January 1933, internationally acclaimed German theologian Gerhard Kittel (1888-1948) joined the Nazi Party and wrote his infamous Die Judenfrage [The Jewish Question] treatise in which he mulled four solutions to the so-called Jewish question – extermination, assimilation, Zionism and apartheid. Die Judenfrage propelled Kittel to the forefront of Nazi academia. From 1936 until the end of the war, he lent his considerable expertise in Second Temple Judaism to the Forschungsabteilung Judenfrage [Research Section on the Jewish Question], a thriving department within the prestigious and lavishly funded Nazi Reichsinstitut system. Kittel’s Reichsinstitut network included Rudolph Hess, Adolf Eichmann, Joseph Goebbels, Julius Streicher, Alfred Rosenberg and Hitler himself. In this period, he produced research that provided authoritative, scholarly justification for Third Reich anti-Jewish legislation, apartheid and the Final Solution. He was arrested and imprisoned as a Nazi activist after Germany’s defeat in 1945 and was permanently discharged from his Theology chair at Tübingen university. He died in 1948. To this day, Kittel’s philological masterpiece, his fifteen-volume Theological Dictionary, can be found on seminary and library shelves around the world. 

 

My research into the political, theological and racial intersectionalities of Gerhard Kittel’s antisemitism contributes and draws on the historiographies of longue durée antisemitism; the complicity of the German church and academia with the Hitler regime; Volksgemeinschaft-inspired voluntarism, careerism and opportunism; and racial science

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1st Supervisor: Dr. Chris Manias  

2nd Supervisor: Dr Christopher Dillon

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Bio:

After graduating in English Literature and Language from St Andrews University, I worked in the performing arts, principally as a music educator, producer, performer, arranger and director. In 2017, the second edition of my critically acclaimed novel, Messiah of the Slums (pseudonym Charlotte Pickering) was published, with a Foreword by (1999) Booker Prize Chair Sir Gerald Kaufman, and an Afterword by former Archbishop of Canterbury Dr Rowan Williams.  Shortly afterwards, I embarked on a theology MA by Research at Liverpool Hope University, where I looked at Gerhard Kittel’s 1933 Die Judenfrage. Concluding that this text formed a theoretical platform for Kittel’s subsequent research alongside notorious Nazi racial scientists, and sensing that some questions about his Reichsinstitut activities and affiliations remain unanswered, I decided to probe further.

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Publications (Articles/reviews):

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Messiah of the Slums (Charlotte Pickering) Fey Publishing ,2017.  ( Link: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Messiah-Slums-Story-Charlotte-Pickering/dp/1908599049/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=messiah+of+the+slums&qid=1632575528&s=books&sr=1-1) 

 

Papers Given/Exhibitions/Public engagement:

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  • Crystal Meph: Christopher Marlowe’s Dr Faustus and the evil of addiction.’

2nd World Congress on Advances in Addiction Science and Medicine Conference, Rome 2019

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  • ‘Writing Evil: the challenges of creating an evil protagonist.’

Great Writing International Creative Writing Conference (UK) 2016

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  • ‘Murder They Wrote’

OCLW Conference Queen Mary University of London (Arts Two lecture theatre) 2016

 

  • ‘Richard III: Loyaulté me Lie? (Loyalty Binds Me?)

The Cabinet of Curiosities 'The Early Modern World: Near and Far, 1450-1650' Conference, Clemson, 2015

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