Katie Trumpener
I’m a film, literary, and cultural historian, with broad interests in European literature, art cinema (particularly Northern and Central Europe) visual culture, and intersection points between film, literature, painting, music and theater. I’ve published widely on German cinema, on the history of the picturebook, and on the history of the novel. On The Viewing Platform: Perspectives on the Panorama (co-ed. with Tim Barringer, Yale UP 2020), on nineteenth-century panorama painting and its continuing influence on twentieth-century visual culture included my essays on painting, film, photography,installation art and the picturebook. I am finishing two books about German cinema, 1930-2000, the first (“Captive Audiences” about cinema, politics, and spectatorship during the Third Reich and the Nazi occupation of Europe), the second (“The Divided Screen”) about Cold War film culture in East and West Germany. I’m also at work on a long-standing book project about the role of the nursery in the European avant-garde (Degas, Auguste and Jean Renoir, Morisot, Vuillard, Bonnard, Seurat, Vanessa Bell, Mallarme, Ibsen, Strindberg, Chekhov, Pirandello, Khodasevich, Woolf, Edward Sackville-West, Marinetti, Gabo, Mussorsky, Diagalev, Eisenstein). I’ve taught a wide range of film and literature courses; I hope to teach a future courses on the backstage musical and the travelling players, and another, perhaps, on the aesthetics of the post-office (epistolary fiction, GPO documentaries, stamp design, WPA murals).
Research Interests
European cinema (especially Germany, Britain, Scandinavia, Central/Eastern Europe); filmgoing practices and film memory; the panorama; painting, visual culture, textiles; the history of the picturebook; Modern European literature (esp. the long history of the novel, modern drama, modernism); anglophone writing; communist culture; musicals and opera.
Education History
Ph.D., Comparative Literature, Stanford University, 1990
AM, English and American Literature, Harvard University, 1983
BA Honours, University of Alberta, Canada, 1982
Free University of Berlin, 1987–8 (Exchange Student)
University of Freiburg, 1980–1 (Foreign Student)
