Dr Tobias Heinrich

Dr Tobias Heinrich is a Lecturer in German and has been at the University of Kent since 2017. Since 2023, he has been Course Lead for Modern Languages and has previously served as the Department’s Director for Recruitment and Admissions.

Before coming to Kent, Tobias taught at the University of Oxford, the University of Vienna, and at Al-Azhar University Cairo. From 2012-2014, he was Deputy Director of the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for the History and Theory of Biography (Vienna) where he led a research strand on Virtual Biographies, resulting in two digital biographical platforms on the Austrian writers Karl Kraus and Ernst Jandl.

He read German Literature, Theatre, Film and Media Studies at the University of Vienna, where he also obtained a PhD with a thesis on biographical writing in the eighteenth century.

Tobias’ first monograph Leben lesen: Zur Theorie der Biographie um 1800 (Reading lives: On the theory of biography circa 1800) was published with Böhlau in 2016. It represents the first comprehensive study to explore the significance of biographical writing during a pivotal period in German literature and thought and investigates the origins of the persistent popularity of biography as a narrative form.

Tobias’ current research explores German literary history through the lens of friendship, focusing on the deep connection between literary expression and the social practices of friendship in German-language culture. The study spans from the eighteenth century’s cult of friendship to contemporary literature in the context of exile and forced migration. Among other topics, the project examines the opportunities for literary expression that the genre of friendly letters provided to Jewish and women writers, such as Rahel Levin Varnhagen; how Franz Kafka’s literary legacy was shaped by his friend Max Brod; or how Herta Müller’s novel Atemschaukel (The Hunger Angel) emerged as a biographical reflection of her friend Oskar Pastior.

A second and related project investigates the relationship between media and friendship. This project, entitled Friendship as Commodity: A Cultural History of Parasocial Relationships, investigates how different forms of media create the illusion of a personal relationship with fictional characters or public figures. It traces the history of these parasocial interactions from the epistolary novels of the eighteenth century and the rise of celebrity culture in the nineteenth and twentieth century to social media influencers and AI companions in the twenty-first century.

Tobias is also interested in film and visual culture, in particular in the context of migration. With Dr Kaveh Abbasian and Dr Alex Marlow-Mann, he has recently organised a conference on ‘Migrant Voices in Contemporary European Cinema’ (https://research.kent.ac.uk/migrant-cinema/) and he is currently editing a volume of essays on this topic.

At the University of Kent, Tobias is Course Lead for Modern languages and teaches modules on German, European and World literature, film, and culture, as well as German language.

He currently convenes all German language modules in the Modern Languages programme and LANG4003 Culture and Heritage: Foundations.