Dr Jack Arscott

Dr Jack Arscott

Postdoctoral Research Assistant
Modern Languages
Available For Postgraduate Supervision

About

Dr Jack Arscott is the post-doctoral research assistant on a three-year international collaboration between Swansea University and the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitaet in Munich, Germany. Co-chaired by Professor Julian Preece and funded jointly by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, the project is entitled Elias Canetti and the British in a European Context: Exile, Reception, Appropriation and examines the Nobel Prize-winning novelist and thinker's place in the British cultural landscape after his flight from Nazi persecution to London shortly before the outbreak of the Second World War. In the first eighteen months of the project, which he spent in Munich, Dr Arscott worked with Professor Preece to translate an anthology of previously unpublished material from Canetti's voluminous archive; he is now co-ordinating both a travelling exhibition called Elias Canetti, A Jewish Emigre in Britain: People, Places, Impressions 1939-1988 and an upcoming international conference on Emigre Encounters: Elias Canetti in Britain/Begegnungen im Exil: Elias Canetti in Grossbritannien, as well as co-authoring a monograph with Professor Preece and Canetti biographer Professor Sven Hanuschek. He will also be taking over teaching on two German to English translation modules in the winter term. He is the author of the monograph Reclaiming the Nation: The Left-Wing Patriotism of Die Weltbuehne in the Weimar Republic (2025).

Areas Of Expertise

  • Elias Canetti
  • German national identity
  • The life and work of Kurt Tucholsky
  • Inter-war German newspapers, especially Die Weltbuehne
  • The Weimar novel

Languages Spoken

  • French
  • German

Career Highlights

Research

Dr Arscott is the author of the chapter 'German Literature, 1880-1945' for Brill's yearbook The Year's Work in Modern Language Studies, in which he reviews new books and journal articles straddling sixty-five years of German-language literary history: https://brill.com/view/journals/ywml/85/1/article-p391_28.xml . He has also reviewed the new English translation of Ernst Toller's autobiography Eine Jugend in Deutschland: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00787191.2025.2518004.

As a member of the board of the Kurt-Tucholsky-Gesellschaft, he continues to publish on the Weimar satirist and Weltbuehne star columnist, including an exploration of Tucholsky's brief stay in England in 1930: https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.1515/anger-2024-0006/html. A German-language article on Tucholsky as an uneasy writer of love letters is forthcoming in 2026.

Award Highlights