Faculty
Department Chair: Massimiliano Tomba
Graduate Program Director: Banu Bargu
- Pronouns he, him, his, his, himself
- Title
- Associate Professor
- Division Humanities Division
- Department
- Literature Department
- Affiliations History of Art/Visual Culture, History of Consciousness Department
- Phone
- Office Location
- Cowell College Academic Building, 110
- Office Hours by appointment
- Mail Stop Cowell Academic Services
- Mailing Address
- 1156 High Street
- Santa Cruz CA 95064
- Faculty Areas of Expertise German Studies, Literature, Marxism, Critical Theory
Summary of Expertise
Twentieth and twenty-first century German literature, culture, and film; Marxism and critical theory; socialist realism and proletarian literature; modernism and left avant-gardes; novel theory
Research Interests
Anna Seghers; Bertolt Brecht; GDR literature and film; work and culture
Biography, Education and Training
BA Bard College; PhD University of Chicago
Selected Publications
The East German Construction Novel of the 1950s: Work, Affect, and Obstinacy (forthcoming from Camden House)
Epic and Exile: Novels of the German Popular Front (Northwestern UP 2015)
"Obstinacy and Allegory in Eduard Claudius's East German Construction Novel Menschen an unsrer Seite." German Studies Review. 44.3 (2021), 545-564
"Brecht and German Studies" in Brecht in Context, ed. Stephen Brockmann (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2021), 242-248
"Revisiting German Proletarian-Revolutionary Literature," in Working-Class Literature(s): Historical and International Perspectives. Volume 2, ed. John Lennon and Magnus Nilsson (Stockholm: Stockholm University Press, 2020), 83–113
"Notes on Seghers and Adorno: Marxism, Post-Fascism, and the Question of Culture" in Anna Seghers: The Challenge of History (German Monitor v. 80), ed. Helen Fehervary, Christiane Zehl Romero, and Amy Kepple Strawser (Leiden: Brill, 2019), 243-260
"Brecht’s Cruel Optimism or, What are Socialist Affects? / Der unbarmherzige Optimismus Bertolt Brechts oder, Was ist ein sozialistischer Affekt?" The Brecht Yearbook 43 (2018), 118-136
"Affective Labors of Socialist Construction in Early East German Literature." Marc Silberman, ed. Back to the Future: Tradition and Innovation in German Studies (New York: Peter Lang 2018), 147-172
"Aufbauzeit oder flaue Zeit?: Anna Seghers's GDR Novels." Kristey boney and Jennifer William, ed. Dimensions in Storytelling: A Festschrift for Helen Fehervary (Suffolk: Camden House, 2018), 70-81
"Socialist Cinema and Modernity." Marc Silberman and Henning Wrage, ed. at the Crossroads of East German and International Film Culture: A Companion (Berlin: De Gruyter 2014) pp. 24-44
"Neustadt: Architecture and Affect in Brigitte Reimann's East German Novel Franziska Linkerhand," The Germanic Review: Literature, Culture, Theory 83:2, 139-166
"Anna Seghers' 'The Man and His Name': Heimat and the Labor of Interpellation in Postwar East Germany," German Studies Review 30.2, 311-330
Teaching Interests
nineteenth to twenty-first century German literature and culture; Marxism and critical theory; film; Bertolt Brecht; Franz Kafka; cultures of socialism; represntations of work
