Sofia Cumming | Associate Postgraduate

Former Member
Critical Thinking in the Plural. Conceptual Approaches in Research in the Social Sciences
Centre Marc Bloch, Friedrichstraße 191, D-10117 Berlin
Email: S.Cumming  ( at )  uea.ac.uk Tel: +49(0) 30 / 20 93 70700

Disciplines : Literature , German studies , Philosophy , Vergleichende Literatur |

Biography

Sofia Cumming is a post-doctoral researcher working in the fields of Comparative Literature and modern European intellectual history. She obtained her PhD from the School of Literature, Drama & Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia (Norwich, UK) in June 2022 for her thesis 'Walter Benjamin's Parisian Passages: Correspondences in European Thought' (passed with no corrections). From 2018 until 2022, she acted as an Associate Tutor and Guest Lecturer at the University of East Anglia, where she taught undergraduate courses on Critical Theory, Literary Criticism, Modernism and European Literature. Sofia was previously a DAAD-funded visiting doctoral researcher at Humboldt-Universität Berlin (2020-21). She holds a BA (Hons) in Comparative Literature from the University of Kent (2011-2015) and a Master of Studies in Modern Languages from the University of Oxford (2015-2016). 

Title of thesis
Walter Benjamin's Parisian Passages - Correspondences in European Thought
Institution of thesis
University of East Anglia
Supervisor
Prof. Duncan Large
Organisation of Events

May 2019: Benjamin’s Baudelaire – Constellations of Modernity, A Workshop for Early Career Researchers, Centre for Philosophy & Critical Thought, Goldsmiths, University of London

May 2019: Berlin Childhood around 1900: A Film Project in Progress by Aura Rosenberg and Frances Scholz, Public screening event + Q&A, Goldsmiths, University of London

Walter Benjamin's Parisian Passages - Correspondences in European Thought

Sofia Cumming's doctoral thesis focuses on the life and work of German-Jewish writer, philosopher and critic, Walter Benjamin. It takes an analysis of Benjamin’s engagement with French literature, as well as research into his Parisian exile and interactions with notable French intellectuals, as the foundation from which to explore the post-war reception of his philosophy in France. From a wider angle, the project aims to examine the history of Franco­-German cultural and intellectual relations throughout the twentieth century and the ways in which philosophies from both nations were exchanged, inherited and developed. Reconciling Marxist and Surrealist analytical frameworks, it ultimately seeks to contribute to a recontextualization of Benjamin’s role as an innovator of both form and content within twentieth-century critical theory.
Publications

Cumming, Sofia, 'Benjamin und Aragon: Zur Frage des Einflusses', lendemains: études comparées sur la France, 46. 184 (2021), 68–83 https://elibrary.narr.digital/article/10.24053/ldm-2021-0033