Brigitte Peucker

Brigitte Peucker's picture
Title: 
Elias Leavenworth Professor of German and Professor of Film and Media Studies Emerita
100 Wall St, New Haven, CT 06511-6607
(203) 432-0785

Biography

Brigitte Peucker is the Elias Leavenworth Professor of German and Film Studies Emerita. She received her PhD from Yale University and has taught at Yale ever since. She is the author of From Arcadia to Elysium (Bouvier, 1980); Lyric Descent in the German Romantic Tradition (Yale, 1987); Incorporating Images: Film and the Rival Arts (Princeton, 1995), which appeared as Verkörpernde Bilder, das Bild des Körpers (Vorwerk 8,1999); The Material Image: Art and the Real in Film (Stanford, 2007). Her most recent book, Aesthetic Spaces: The Place of Art in Film, appeared in 2019 (Northwestern UP). She is the editor of Wiley-Blackwell’s Companion to Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 2012 and co-editor, with Ido Lewit, of A Light Touch: New Approaches to Ernst Lubitsch, forthcoming with Amsterdam University Press. She writes and teaches in the areas of film’s relation to the other arts (intermediality); the films of Alfred Hitchcock; the theory and history of visuality and spectatorship; the classic American horror film and various aspects of German cinema. Her most recent essays are “Hitchcock’s Undertexts: Objects and Language” in Journal of Film/ Philosophy (Feb. 2023); “In the Picture: Immersion as Intermedial Strategy,” Intermedial Encounters: Essays in Honour of Agnes Petho (2022) and “Ineffability?: The Several Vermeers,” in Through a Glass Darkly: Screening the Art World, ed. Temenuga Trifonova (Amsterdam UP, 2022). Professor Peucker is the recipient of Woodrow Wilson, Morse, and Mellon Fellowships, served as Chair of the Film Studies Program, 1986-2000, as Chair of the German Department, 1997-2002 and 2003-4, and was, for many years, Director of Graduate Studies in both departments.

Education History

BA, Mount Holyoke College
NYU Summer Program in Filmmaking
Ph.D., Yale University

Books

  • A Light Touch: New Approaches to Ernst Lubitsch, Brigitte Peucker and Ido Lewit, eds (Amsterdam UP) forthcoming
  • Aesthetic Spaces: The Place of Art in Film, (Evanston, Il.: Northwestern University Press, 2019).
  • Wiley-Blackwell’s Companion to Rainer Werner Fassbinder, ed. (New York: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012).
  • The Material Image: Art and the Real in Film, Cultural Memory in the Present, eds. Mieke Bal and Hent DeVries, (Stanford University Press, 2007).
  • Verkörpernde Bilder/Das Bild des Körpers: Film und die anderen Künste (Berlin: Verlag Vorwerk 8, 1999).
  • Incorporating Images: Film and the Rival Arts (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995).
  • Lyric Descent in the German Romantic Tradition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987).
  • Arcadia to Elysium:  Preromantic Modes in Eighteenth-Century Germany, Studien zur Germanistik, Anglistik, und Komparatistik, vol. 81 (Bonn:  Bouvier, 1980).

Articles

  • “Hitchcock’s Undertexts: Objects and Language” Journal of Film/Philosophy (Feb. 2023)
  • “In the Picture: Immersion as Intermedial Strategy,” Intermedial Encounters: Studies in Honour of  Agnes Petho,  eds. Melinda Blos-Jani et al. (Cluj-Napoca: Scientia KiaDO, 2022), 203-210.
  • “Ineffability? The Several Vermeers,” Through a Glass Darkly: Screening the Art World, ed. Temenuga Trifonova, (Amsterdam UP), 85-100.

Publications

Films provide valuable spaces for aesthetic experimentation and analysis, for cinema’s openness to other media has always allowed it to expand its own. In Aesthetic Spaces, Brigitte Peucker shows that when painterly or theatrical conventions are appropriated by the medium of film, the dissonant effects produced open it up to intermedial reflection and tell us a great deal about cinema itself.

“A Companion to Rainer Werner Fassbinder is the first of its kind to engage with this important figure. Twenty-eight essays by an international group of scholars consider this controversial director’s contribution to German cinema, German history, gender studies, and auteurship.