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Mariatte Denman, Assistant Professor, Germanic Languages and Literature

Contact Info:

Office Location:
Office Phone:	+1 919 660 3160
Email Address:

Education:

German Literature with Designated Emphases in Critical Theory and Feminist Research and Theory	University of California, Davis	1997
German Literature	University of California at Davis, Davis CA	1992
German, English and French Literature and Religious Studies	University of Berne, Bern, Switzerland	1986
French Literature and Philosophy	University of Lausanne, Switzerland	1984

Specialties:

20th Century Literature
Critical Theory
Gender Studies

Research Interests: Post WWII Literature and Culture, Memory Studies

Current projects: Book-length study on the representation of female perpetrators in German culture since the end of the cold war.

My research interests focus on issues of national identity, memory and aesthetics in 20th century German, Swiss and Austrian visual and literary works and cultural controversies. Drawing on interdisciplinary theories on national identity, femini st research on gender as an epistemological category, and Frankfurt School findings on the intersection of the cultural and the social in the formation of the nation, my dissertation, "Staging the Nation: Representations of Nationhood and Gender in Plays, Images, and Films in Postwar West Germany (1945-1949)," elucidates the gendered structure of visual representations of West German national identity in the immediate postwar years, as manifested, for instance, in the cultural journal "Der Ruf," Wolfgang Staudte’s film "Die Mörder sind unter uns, and Carl Zuckmayer’s play Des Teufels General." While my study focuses on the postwar period in West Germany, it also addresses contemporary controversies on national identity in post-wall Germany, such as the exhibit on the Wehrmacht crimes and the interior reconfiguration of the national memorial site, the Neue Wache. My dissertation received the 1998 Coalition of Women in German dissertation prize.

Keywords:

Europe • Germany • Switzerland • Austria • Literature • Art • Feminism

Representative Publications   (More Publications)

1. M. Denman, Nostalgia for a Better Germany -- Carl Zuckmayer’s Drama "Des Teufels General", German Quarterly (Fall, 2003)
2. M. Denman, If Auschwitz were in Switzerland....' German Swiss Intellectuals Respond to the Nazi Gold Affair, New German Critique, vol. 85 (2002), pp. 167-91
3. M. Denman, Patriotism, Dialektdichtung, Tatsachenroman, in Feminist Encyclopedia of German Literature, edited by Susanne Kord and Friederike Eigler (1997), Greenwood Press,
4. M. Denman, Visualizing the Nation: Madonnas and Mourning Mothers in Postwar Germany, (1945-1949), in Gender and Germanness, edited by Patricia Herminghouse and Magda Mueller (1997), Berghahn Press