Jenny Watson

Research Fellow (04/2024 – 08/2024)

Articulating Atrocity: Metaphors of Rural Life in Accounts of Mass Shooting

Building on existing works on agricultural metaphors in the context of mass killing, the project expands the focus by including historical sources. It analyses first-hand accounts of mass shootings to explore the ways in which perpetrators, survivors and witnesses used language from everyday life to articulate the atrocities they had committed, experienced or witnessed. The hypothesis - developed from work with literary texts and inspired by Alon Confinos' work on "unconscious narrative enactment" - is that individuals view the motives and processes of mass murder through the lens of the norms of communal processes such as hunting, harvesting and slaughter.

Jenny Watson, Chancellor's Fellow at the University of Edinburgh, where she teaches in the German programme of the School of Languages, Literatures and Cultures. Her postdoctoral project, “Restless Earth: Extra-Concentrationary Violence since 1945”, focused on the representation of the so-called "Holocaust by Bullets" in post-war German-language literature.

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