Sonja Malzner

Sonja Malzner is a Lecturer at the University of Rouen Normandy within the UFR Letters and Human Sciences. She is a member of the European Research Institute for Comparative Literature and Literary Theory (ERIAC), contributing to its research axes on spaces, cultures, and intermedial approaches. Her work focuses on postcolonial African studies, Austrian cultural history, and intermedial relationships between text and image in travel documentation.

Her research explores representations of the 'Other' in colonial contexts, analyzing travelogues, photographs, and visual materials from the early 20th century. Key projects include studies on German and French colonial travel narratives, the Polényk Fund archives, and exhibitions on colonial portraiture. She has coordinated international conferences on topics like colonial imagery and historiography, and her publications include monographs and edited volumes on African and Austrian cultural histories.

Malzner's teaching spans German and Austrian cultural history (19th–20th centuries), Austrian literature, and business German. She has developed educational projects including TANDEM exchanges with German universities and pedagogical approaches to concrete poetry in language teaching.

Her academic contributions include curating exhibitions such as 'Treasures from the Polényk Fund' and 'Porters in the colonial era,' which highlight underrepresented archival materials. She actively participates in interdisciplinary networks like the Rouen Ethnolinguistics Project and the LabEx transferS.