JM Ritchie

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James MacPherson Ritchie (born July 10, 1927 in Aberdeen ; died April 30, 2013 in Sheffield ) was a British German studies scholar and literary translator. Among colleagues, his nickname was Hamish .

Life

Ritchie attended school in Aberdeen and studied, with a break from military service as a translator in the Royal Air Force in theaters of war in Italy and Germany, German at the University of Aberdeen (MA and DLitt). He received his doctorate in 1954 from the University of Tübingen . He worked from 1954 as an assistant at the University of Glasgow and from 1961 as an associate professor at the University of New South Wales . In 1965 he went to the University of Hull and in 1970 he was appointed to the University of Sheffield as a German studies specialist before receiving a professorship at the University of Aberdeen in 1987. In Sheffield he campaigned for a town twinning with Bochum .

Ritchie has published over a hundred academic articles and books. He was on the editorial staff of German Life and Letters for four decades . Ritchie researched in particular the German-speaking writers who were exiled during the Nazi era and was a key co-founder of the Research Center for Germans and Austrians in Exile in Great Britain at the University of London .

He translated works of literary expressionism, including plays by Ernst Toller , Oskar Kokoschka and Carl Sternheim . He wrote a monograph on the poet Gottfried Benn .

Ritchie became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and was awarded the Federal Order of Merit in 1986 . The German Life and Letters magazine dedicated the July 1992 issue to him as a "Festschrift".

Fonts

  • Martin Salander. 1954. Dissertation at the University of Tübingen.
  • (Ed.): Periods in German Literature. Wolff, London 1966.
  • (Ed.): Seven Expressionist plays. Translation by JM Ritchie, HF Garten. Calder & Boyars, London 1968.
  • Gottfried Benn. The Unreconstructed Expressionist. Wolff, London 1972.
  • German expressionist drama. Twayne, Boston 1976.
  • Brecht. Arnold, London 1976.
  • German Literature under National Socialism. Croom Helm, London 1983.
  • German exiles. British Perspectives. Lang, New York 1997.

literature

  • Ian Wallace (Ed.): Voices from Exile. Essays in Memory of Hamish Ritchie. Brill, Leiden / Boston 2015.
  • JKA Thomaneck: James (Hamish) MacPherson Ritchie , in: German Life and Letters , July 1992, pp. 195f.
    • Bibliography 1957 to 1992, pp. 197ff.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ James MacPherson Ritchie , in the directory of Germanists at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg
personal data
SURNAME Ritchie, JM
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Ritchie, James MacPherson (full name); Hamish Ritchie (nickname)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British German studies specialist and translator
DATE OF BIRTH July 10, 1927
PLACE OF BIRTH Aberdeen
DATE OF DEATH April 30, 2013
Place of death Sheffield