Dr Tobias Heinrich

Lecturer in German
Telephone
+44 (0)1227 816388
Dr Tobias Heinrich

About

Dr Tobias Heinrich is a Lecturer in German and has been at the University of Kent since 2017. Since 2023, he has been Course Lead for Modern Languages and has previously served as the Department’s Director for Recruitment and Admissions.

Before coming to Kent, Tobias taught at the University of Oxford, the University of Vienna, and at Al-Azhar University Cairo. From 2012-2014, he was Deputy Director of the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for the History and Theory of Biography (Vienna) where he led a research strand on Virtual Biographies, resulting in two digital biographical platforms on the Austrian writers Karl Kraus and Ernst Jandl.

He read German Literature, Theatre, Film and Media Studies at the University of Vienna, where he also obtained a PhD with a thesis on biographical writing in the eighteenth century.

Research interests

Tobias’ current research explores how different forms of media create the illusion of a personal relationship with fictional characters or public figures. He traces the history of these parasocial interactions from the epistolary novels of the eighteenth century and the rise of celebrity culture in the nineteenth and twentieth century to social media influencers and AI companions in the twenty-first century. This project will see the publication of his second book, entitled Friendship as Commodity: A Cultural History of Parasocial Relationships.

His first monograph Leben lesen: Zur Theorie der Biographie um 1800 (Reading lives: On the theory of biography circa 1800) was published with Böhlau in 2016 and investigates the origins of the persistent popularity of biography as a narrative form.

Tobias is also interested in film and visual culture, in particular in the context of migration. With Dr Kaveh Abbasian and Dr Alex Marlow-Mann, he is currently organising a conference on ‘Migrant Voices in Contemporary European Cinema’ (https://research.kent.ac.uk/migrant-cinema/).

Teaching

At the University of Kent, Tobias teaches German, European and World literature, film, and culture, as well as German language.

He currently convenes GRMN3120: Images of Germany, HUMA4000: The Home, and LANG5004: From Gutenberg to Zuckerberg: Technology, Media, Modernity.

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