Paula Derdiger

Photo of Paula Derdiger
Professional Title
Associate Professor, English Graduate Faculty
Paula Derdiger completed her Ph.D. in English at McGill University before joining UMD in 2015. Her primary area of research and teaching is modern British literature, specifically the mid-twentieth century period and the significant impact of World War II on literary and cultural production. In October 2020, she published her first monograph, Reconstruction Fiction: Housing and Realist Literature in Postwar Britain, and she has published a number of articles and book chapters on British writers from the mid-century period with attention to modernism, wartime culture, and postwar realism. Film studies is her secondary area of expertise, and her next monograph will bring together literary and cinematic interests as they pertain to hybrid identities and multi-genre work in the transnational context of World War II. She is a board member of the professional society The Space Between: Literature and Culture, 1914-1945 and an active member of the Modernist Studies Association. At UMD she regularly teaches courses on twentieth-century British literature, contemporary global Anglophone literature, film analysis, and adaptation.

 

Courses Taught

ENGL 2601: Reading Film
ENGL 2571: Contemporary Literature
ENGL 3502: British Literature II
ENGL 4292: Literature into Film
ENGL 5564: Studies in British Literature After 1900: British Literature of the 1950s and 1960s
ENGL 5580: The Novel 
ENGL 5664: Small Presses, Little Magazines, and Modernism
ENGL 8181: Seminar in British Literature: British Literature and World War II (graduate course)
ENGL 8906: Introduction to Literary Theory (graduate course)

Publications

Reconstruction Fiction book cover
 

"Letters from London: Mollie Panter-Downes Brings World War to The New Yorker." Journal of Modern Periodical Studies. Forthcoming December 2021.

‘“Now you’re one of us’: Surveying Postwar Berlin in Billy Wilder’s A Foreign Affair.” International Intrigue: Plotting Espionage as Cultural Artifact, special issue of The Space Between: Literature and Culture, 1914-1945. Vol. 13. 2017. http://scalar.usc.edu/works/the-space-between-literature-and-culture-1914-1945/vol13_2017_derdiger.

“To Drag Out a Rough Poetry: Colin MacInnes and the New Brutalism in Postwar Britain.” Modern Fiction Studies. 62.1. Spring 2016. 53-69.

‘“We Shall Never Make a Home of This’: Elizabeth Taylor’s Postwar Reconstruction Fiction.” Long Shadows: The Second World War in British Literature and Film, 1943 to the Present. Ed. Petra Rau. Evanston: Northwestern UP. 2016.

(With Phyllis Lassner), “Domestic Gothic, the Global Primitive, and Gender Relations in Elizabeth Bowen’s The Last September and The House in Paris.” Irish Modernism and the Global Primitive. Eds. Claire A. Culleton and Maria McGarrity. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. 195-214.