Fatima Naqvi

Fatima Naqvi is Elias W. Leavenworth Professor of German and Film and Media Studies (FMS). She is currently chair of the FMS program as well as of the European Studies Council. Her work is situated at the intersection of literature, film, and architecture. In her research and teaching, the environment as it relates to human experience stands in the foreground. Her work is deeply committed to curmudgeons, nay-sayers, and querulous types: Thomas Bernhard, Elfriede Jelinek, Peter Handke, Ulrich Seidl, Michael Haneke, Nikolaus Geyrhalter, Friederike Mayröcker, and Ruth Beckermann have been privileged subjects of study.

Recent work has looked at the interplay between landscape and what is known as “coming to terms” with the traumatic past in the Federal Republic of Germany after World War II. In The Insulted Landscape (2021), she groups strange bedfellows—Alexander Kluge, Wim Wenders, Werner Herzog, Peter Handke, Elfriede Jelinek, Alexander Mitscherlich and Albert Speer—to show how the post-war landscape is used to reimagine the post-war citizen. Psychoanalytic discourse and urban planning discussions focus on the loss of landscape in the 1960s, simultaneously with the rehabilitation of Hitler’s premier architect Speer and renewed interest in the Nazis’ inclusion of landscape in their propaganda. Artists of the 1960s and 1970s intervene to re-evaluate the degraded environment as the site of myriad possibilities and anti-fascist sentiment.

At the moment, she is working on a book entitled “Architecture of Illness,” in which she looks at hospitals in Vienna to tell a story about their place in modern culture. Focusing on the period of 1860-2020, she examines the construction of clinics in the waning years of the Austro-Hungarian empire. In this period, hospitals mold the modern experience of the emergent middle class. (please see Yale Today for a short video on the project https://news.yale.edu/2023/08/28/meet-fas-faculty-fatima-naqvi?utm_source=YaleToday&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=YT_YaleToday-Staff_8-30-2023(link is external)) Another current project focuses on the topic of fremdschämen—the sense of shame for another—in contemporary media culture with special attention to the films of Ulrich Seidl, sculptures of Erwin Wurm, and texts by Elfriede Jelinek. Finally, together with translator Tess Lewis, she is working on a reader centered on The Women of Red Vienna, which seeks to draw attention to many sidelined and forgotten writers of the 1920s into the early 1930s with new translations. Authors such as Mela Hartwig and Else Feldmann, whose careers were cut short by the rise of Austrofascism and who ended up in exile or concentration camps, lost any readerships they once had.

She has written books on the perception of victimhood in Western European culture between 1968 and the new millennium (The Literary and Cultural Rhetoric of Victimhood, 2007). The scintillating films of Michael Haneke have been a persistent focus, with three books titled Trügerische Vertrautheit (Deceptive Familiarity, 2010), Michael Haneke: Interviews (2020), and The White Ribbon (2020). She began exploring the built environment in her book on the intersection of the architectural avantgarde and the discourse of Bildung in novels by Thomas Bernhard (How We Learn Where We Live, 2016).

She invites students from all parts of the university to help her think about such problems in courses such as “Landscape, Film, and Architecture” and “Cinema of Crisis.” She strives for an inclusive classroom experience, where varied viewpoints can be expressed.

Beyond the classroom, she searches out dialogue with peers and seeks interconnections with other academics, artists, and the broader public. She has been on the board of the Institute for Cultural Inquiry–Kulturlabor Berlin (ICI Berlin) since 2006, which has formulated cutting-edge topics for cultural analysis. She remains true to her Austrian interests as a board member of the Botstiber Institute for Austrian-American Studies since 2008, participating in the yearly fellowship selection. As an editorial board member or co-editor for both German, US-American, and Austrian publishing venues such as the journals Germanic Review, New German Critique, Wiener Digital Revue, Recherche, and Volltext or the book series Media: Literaturwissenschaftliche Forschungen (Metzler Verlag) and Medienkulturwissenschaft (Brill), she hopes to introduce new voices and new scholars to different publics—an aim she also pursues as the Chair of the Film & Media Studies Program and the European Studies Council at Yale.

She has held visiting professorships at the Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz and Harvard University, and for many years she taught at Rutgers University. In what feels like another lifetime, she attended Dartmouth (BA) and Harvard (MA, PhD).

Highlighted Publications

“Fassbinder’s Fascist Drag,” in New German Critique, ed. Brad Prager (forthcoming 2025).

“Fremdschämen: The Ethics of Embarrassment in Ulrich Seidl, Erwin Wurm, and Elfriede Jelinek,” Utopie und Dystopie, eds. Martin Vejvar und Nicole Streitler-Kastberger (Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter, 2023) 197–21.

Choral Figurations. Co-editor of special issue of The Germanic Review 98.2 (2023); intro+translation of Ulrike Haß’s Kraftfeld Chor.

Angst vor dem Krankenhaus [Fear of Hospitals]. Co-editor of special dossier of Literatur + Kritik (March 2022).

The Insulted Landscape: Postwar German Culture 1960-1995 (Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann, 2021).