Susanne Ledanff - Lecturer and Author

Susanne Ledanff has been researching and publishing for 34 years in various fields of German of German literary and culture studies. Her publications appear in both German and English. Her magnum opus, the book Hauptstadtphantasien. Berliner Stadtlektüren in der Gegenwartsliteratur 1989-1998 consists of 676 pages and was published by Aisthesis in 2009. Susanne Ledanff is a rcognized  expert in  Berlin literature and also of contemporary German literary criticism.

Her work as both a scholar of German literature and as a university instructor have led Susanne Ledanff to culturally diverse nations and geographic regions. From her hometown of Berlin, she eventually left the Technical University of Berlin to take up a post in Nigeria as DAAD lecturer, ultimately becoming Associate Professor of German at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand.  She views herself as an intermediator of German culture in countries outside the German-speaking lands. Her research interests are as diverse as her experiences and encompass German classics such as Goethe, Heine, and Fontane. As a teacher of intercultural German Studies, Ledanff has become an all-around expert in almost all areas of modern  German literature. She has also supervised a smaller number of Masters and PhD students. During her almost 20 years in New Zealand, she has been back to Berlin almost every year for research and writing. Writing her book on Berlin literature proved to be a rewarding challenge, allowing her to portray the cultural and literary developments of Berlin after the fall of the Wall. Both her distance from and familiarity with the city informed her work on this project in many meaningful ways.