Paula Derdiger

woman with chin length hair and glasses smiling in front of book case
Professional Title
English BA Program Coordinator, Associate Professor
Paula Derdiger completed her Ph.D. in English at McGill University before joining UMD in 2015. Her research and teaching focuses primarily on modern British and anglophone literature, specifically the mid-twentieth century period and the significant impact of World War II on literary and cultural production. Her secondary field of expertise is film studies and visual culture; she has written on midcentury film, modern wood engraving, and photography.  At UMD she regularly teaches courses on the British novel, the literature and culture of World War II, contemporary literature and race, film analysis, and adaptation. 

In October 2020, she published her first monograph, Reconstruction Fiction: Housing and Realist Literature in Postwar Britain, and she has published a number of articles and book chapters on British writers from the mid-century period with attention to modernism, wartime culture, and postwar literature and culture. This work has appeared or will appear in Elizabeth Bowen in Context (Cambridge University Press, 2026), The Journal of Modern Periodical Studies, Modern Fiction Studies, Modernist Cultures, and The Space Between. Her current book project examines how popular periodicals with a transnational reach -- Collier's Weekly, The New Yorker, Vogue -- formally mediated World War II and the Holocaust. This interdisciplinary project, which focuses on work produced by Martha Gellhorn, John Hersey, Lee Miller, and Mollie Panter-Downes, sits at the generative intersection of modern periodical studies, World War II and Jewish studies, and literary and visual culture studies.   
She is an active member of the professional society The Space Between: Literature and Culture, 1914-1945 and the Modernist Studies Association.

 

Courses Taught

ENGL 2601: Reading Film
ENGL 2571: Contemporary Literature
ENGL 3502: British Literature II
ENGL 4292: Literature into Film
ENGL 5564: Studies in British Literature After 1900: British Literature of the 1950s and 1960s
ENGL 5580: The Novel 
ENGL 5664: Small Presses, Little Magazines, and Modernism
 
ENGL 8181: Seminar in British Literature: British Literature and World War II (graduate course)
ENGL 8906: Introduction to Literary Theory (graduate course)

Publications

Reconstruction Fiction book cover
 

"Letters from London: Mollie Panter-Downes Brings World War to The New Yorker." Journal of Modern Periodical Studies. Forthcoming December 2021.

‘“Now you’re one of us’: Surveying Postwar Berlin in Billy Wilder’s A Foreign Affair.” International Intrigue: Plotting Espionage as Cultural Artifact, special issue of The Space Between: Literature and Culture, 1914-1945. Vol. 13. 2017. http://scalar.usc.edu/works/the-space-between-literature-and-culture-1914-1945/vol13_2017_derdiger.

“To Drag Out a Rough Poetry: Colin MacInnes and the New Brutalism in Postwar Britain.” Modern Fiction Studies. 62.1. Spring 2016. 53-69.

‘“We Shall Never Make a Home of This’: Elizabeth Taylor’s Postwar Reconstruction Fiction.” Long Shadows: The Second World War in British Literature and Film, 1943 to the Present. Ed. Petra Rau. Evanston: Northwestern UP. 2016.

(With Phyllis Lassner), “Domestic Gothic, the Global Primitive, and Gender Relations in Elizabeth Bowen’s The Last September and The House in Paris.” Irish Modernism and the Global Primitive. Eds. Claire A. Culleton and Maria McGarrity. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. 195-214.