Dr Jenny Watson received her PhD in German Studies at Swansea University in 2017. Since then she has worked at the University of Sheffield, where she taught German and Dutch Literature, German and Dutch Language and Literary Translation. She came to Edinburgh as a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in January 2019 and was appointed Chancellor's Fellow in April 2021. 

Dr Watson's work focuses on historical subjectivity in literature and on the role of landscape in the German literature of memory. 

She has worked extensively on the novels and short stories of Romanian-German Nobel Prize winner Herta Müller and is currently working on the first English-language monograph on her writing. Her current research focuses on literary depictions of the face-to-face killing during the Holocaust and intimate violence on the German home front. 

Dr Watson is currently collaborating on an edited volume on German visions of Eastern Europe during the long 20th Century with fellow Herta Müller specialist Dr Michel Mallet (Universite de Moncton) and developing a project on intimate violence on the German home front with Dr Katie Stone (University of Warwick). Information about the conference Haunted Landscapes of German Eastern Europe (August 2021) can be found at https://www.ed.ac.uk/literatures-languages-cultures/delc/german/news-and-events/