E-Mail: helena.duffy@khk.uni-saarland.de
Helena Duffy (MSt Oxon, PhD Oxford Brookes) is a professor of French and comparative literature at the University of Wrocław, Poland. Her research focuses on cultural representations of the Holocaust, which she has recently examined through eco-critical and zoo-critical perspectives. She is the author of two monographs – World War II in Andreï Makine’s Historiographic Metafiction (Brill, 2018) and The Holocaust in French Postmodern Fiction (Legenda, 2022) – and the co-editor of three edited volumes: Trauma, Ethics, Hermeneutics (Legenda, 2024), Storying the Ecocatastrophe (Routledge, 2024), and The Holocaust and Ecocide in Culture and Public Debate (Routledge, forthcoming 2026). She has edited or co-edited six special issues of academic journals (e.g., French Forum, Holocaust Studies, Journal of Holocaust Research) and has published over fifty journal articles and book chapters. Since 2024, she has been a member of Academia Europaea.
SELECTED PUBLICATIONS
- Duffy, Helena. “Heavy Sand: An Ecocritical Reading of Three Literary Representations of the Holocaust by Bullets”. In Cambridge History of Holocaust Literature, edited by Erin McGlothlin and Stuart Taberner. Cambridge University Press, 2026. Forthcoming.
- Duffy, Helena. “Collateral Damage: Animal War Trauma in Wolfdietrich Schnurre’s Short Stories”. Oxford German Studies (2026). Forthcoming.
- Duffy, Helena. “Like Sheep to the Slaughter: Animal Agency and the Echoes of the Holocaust in Wolfdietrich Schnurre’s Writing”. German Life and Letters 77, no. 4 (2024): 491–513. https://doi.org/10.1111/glal.12425.
- Duffy, Helena. “Literary Representations of Auschwitz and the Impossibility of Containment: Econarratological Reading of Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones and Martin Amis’s The Zone of Interest”. In Handbook of Camp Geographies, edited by Claudio Minca, Yolanda Weima, and Richard Carter-White. De Gruyter. Forthcoming.
- Duffy, Helena. “‘Les frontières sont ma prison’: Carceral Imagery in French Holocaust Literature”. In Cambridge Companion to World Prisons after 1945, edited by Claire Wetall. Cambridge University Press. Forthcoming.
- Duffy, Helena. “The Holocaust, the Crisis of Humanism and ‘The Jewish Dog’ as a Medium of De/Re-humanisation in French Literature”. In The Routledge Companion to Literature and Crisis, edited by Julia Kuznetsky et al., 244–55. Routledge, 2025.
CURE RESEARCH PROJECT
Embodied Trauma Beyond the Human: The Reparative Potential of Holocaust Literature
CURE research project 2026/27