Professor Hilda Meldrum Brown, Emeritus Professor of German at the University of Oxford, is internationally known for her work on Heinrich von Kleist. She has published widely on German literary topics from Goethe to Christa Wolf. Her research has for some years had a strong interdisciplinary bias and involves studying connections between literature, drama, music, the visual arts, especially in the field of German Romanticism and Richard Wagner. Her new book on the Gesamtkunstwerk and Richard Wagner combines a number of these areas of research and has been supported by The Leverhulme Trust (Emeritus Research Fellowship) and a Hawthornden Fellowship at The International Retreat for Writers.