Melina Mandelbaum
Dr Melina Mandelbaum is a literary and cultural scholar whose interdisciplinary research bridges political theory, literary studies, and cultural analysis. With a foundational background in international politics, her work examines how conceptions of citizenship, belonging, and political agency are represented and contested across literary texts, political theory, and policy discourses – both in historical contexts and in relation to imagined futures.
Melina holds the position of Schröder Research Associate and Affiliated Lecturer in the German section of the Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages and Linguistics at the University of Cambridge, and is also a College Research Associate at King’s College, Cambridge. Her current research encompasses two major strands: the first investigates historical imaginaries of citizenship in twentieth-century German literature; the second examines contemporary future oriented visions of citizenship as they emerge in literary fiction, cultural artifacts, and policy documents in Germany and internationally.
Publications:
Colvin, S. and M. Mandelbaum, eds, Routledge Handbook of German Politics and Culture, second edition, Routledge, 2027 (forthcoming).
Mandelbaum, M., ‘“We Must be Open to New Technologies”: A Close Reading of Germany’s Future Strategy for Research and Innovation’, German Politics and Society, summer 2025 (forthcoming)
Mandelbaum, M., ‘“To the Future Turned, We Stand”: Progress and the Temporal Politics of Citizenship in the German Democratic Republic’, Oxford German Studies, Feb 2024
Mandelbaum, M., ‘Administering Exclusion: Statelessness, Identity Papers, and Narrative Strategy in B. Traven’s The Death Ship’ (1926)’, Forum for Modern Language Studies, April 2021 (awarded the Forum Prize for best essay of the year).
In progress:
Mandelbaum, M.: Reading Citizens: Narratives of Citizenship in the Twentieth-Century German Novel (runner-up, Women in German Studies book Prize)
Mandelbaum, M.: ‘Technology and the Modernist Crisis of Perception’ (article)