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In my current investigation of literary and visual representations of cats in German culture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, I consider a number of questions on alterity and sameness as well as the relationship between humans and animals. For this study, I am applying an ecocritical approach to cats as an animal other that subverts longstanding humanist traditions of constructing the human. I am particularly interested in how this process appears to be tied in general to the exposure to a threatening and revolutionizing (Um)Welt. In 2008, together with my research collaborator Birgit Tautz (Bowdoin College), I began to connect key questions about the representation of animals to broader concerns of identity and community in a CBB-Mellon Foundation Grant-sponsored project entitled Thinking Beyond Nation.
Alongside this larger project, I continue my interest in German film with presentations at the ACTFL Convention 2008 on Turkish-German filmmaker Fatih Akin (see also my 2007 article on Akin in Glossen) as well as at the upcoming German Studies Association (Arlington, VA, Oct. 2009) on the representation of terrorism. An article on the German Krautrock group Faust and questions of national identity, written with Harris Sei '10, will be published in December 2009 in the journal Popular Music and Society). And just this summer (June 2009) a new edition of Reinhold Solger's 1862 novel Anton in Amerika came out with the German publisher Wehrhahn Verlag. It was completed in 2008 with the research assistance of Meredith Fast '11.
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