Kerstin Pfeiffer

My academic background is in English Literature, Medieval & Modern History, and Art History, having completed a Magister Artium Degree at the Johannes Gutenberg-Universiaet in Mainz (Germany) before moving to the UK. I joined Heriot-Watt as a lecturer in the Department of Languages & Intercultrual Studies after working at the University of Stirling for a number of years and completing a PhD in English Studies there.  My thesis focused on how medieval English religious drama evokes and theorises emotions and thus participates in contemporaneous debates about the links between sensation, emotion and cognition. While my research focus has changed somewhat since then, the boarder question of the social and cultural work that drama does (or can do) is still one that guides my research interests. 

I teach on a variety of mostly undergraduate courses in Cultural Studies and German, including Coparative Social & Cultural Issues, Introduction to World History & Culture, Sustainable Development and the Intercultural Context, Germany in Europe. 

I am also the School of Social Science's Deputy Associate Executive Dean (Academic Quality) for the Edinburgh campus. 

Since 2015, I have been a mmeber of the International Society for Ethnology  & Folklore (SIEF), and I co-led SIEF's BASE working group (Bodies, affects, sensations, emotions) from 2015 to 2023. 

Form 2018 to 2022, I served as External Examiner for German at the University of the West of Scotland. 

My research is located at the intersections between theatre & performance studies and heritage studies. It centres on performative engagements with cultural heritage, focusing on two aspects in particular: firstly, how performances engage audiences through their embodied practices; and secondly, the role taht performances play in shaping, maintaining and challenging notions of community and identity. 

My current research projects focus on the role of  theatrical performances as platforms for regional identity construction in the context of festivals and on theatre for social change. 

I am a member of the Intercultural Reserach Centre at Heriot-Watt University.

Co-investigator, CoHERE Critical Heritages: performing and representing identities in Europe

• Between 2016 and 2019, I was a co-investigator for WP3 of the Horizon 2020-funded CoHERE Critical Heritages: performing and representing identities in Europe (grant agr. 693289). Collaborating with anthropologists, ethnomusicologists and theatre practitioners, I explore the construction of cultural and linguistic idenities through performances in bilingual, non-professional theatre in Germany and Czechia.  

Co-investigator, Deaf people's participation in theatre

• Internal research grant (2018)