Christina is interested in the intersections between literature, history, memory, and politics. She has published about Australian war writing, the teaching of Shakespeare in the Third Reich and socialist East Germany, and the extraordinary reception of Australian books behind the Berlin Wall. She is currently researching a socialist publishing program, run out of East Berlin during the Cold War.
She holds a PhD from the University of Freiburg and an undergraduate degree from the University of Tübingen (Staatsexamen). She is the ACT representative of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature and a member of the advisory board of the Teaching and Learning War network.
Current projects include:
- Based on a true Story: The First World War in the Australian Novel: a book tracing Australian novelists' engagement with the First World War from 1914 to the Centenary, under contract with Sydney University Press
- Seven Seas’ English-language paperbacks and the Cold War on the bookshelf: Enlisting World literature: ARC-funded DECRA project (DE180101150)
- Teaching and Learning War Network: Education and Modern Conflict in an International Comparative Perspective: funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC)
- The First World War, 100 Years on: Transnational cultures of remembrance in interdisciplinary comparison, as part of a team of researchers from Free University Berlin and UNSW Canberra, funded by the DAAD Australia-Germany Joint Research Cooperation Scheme (2016/17)
Courses convened:
I am a recipient of a 2016 Vice Chancellor's Award for Teaching Excellence. Most recently, I have convened the following courses:
- ZHSS1101: English and Media Studies 1A -- Culture and Communication
- ZHSS2133: Another Country: Australian Literature
- ZHSS3140: Literatures of the World
- ZHSS8106: War & Memory (entirely online)
- ZHSS8125: Strategic Communication (entirely online)
Media & Outreach:
Christina has spoken on ABC Radio National and ABC television about Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front and the literature of the First World War more broadly. You can listen to her here and here and here. An interview with SBS German radio on the publication of Australian books in East Germany is here. She was an invited speaker at the WeberWorldCafé, Narrating the First World War: Experiences and Reports from Transregional Perspectives, held at the Deutsches Historisches Museum in Berlin on 16 September 2014.
Twitter: @ChSpittel
PhD Supervision:
Carolyn Carr, New Zealand Troopship Magazines of the First World War (jointly supervised with Dr John Connor)
Noahlyn Maranan, Does social media improve democracy in the Philippines? (jointly supervised with Professor Anthony Burke)