Gerd Gemünden
Professor of German StudiesProfessor of Film and Media StudiesProfessor of Comparative LiteratureThe Sherman Fairchild Professor in the Humanities
Gerd Gemünden is the Sherman Fairchild Professor of the Humanities, and Professor of German Studies, Film and Media Studies, and Comparative Literature. He currently serves as Chair of the Program in Comparative Literature.
He studied German, English and Philosophy at the University of Tübingen and Comparative Literature at the University of Oregon (Ph.D. 1988). His specialties include critical theory and cultural studies, the history and theory of German cinema, global art cinema, an the study of exile, migration and diaspora. He is the author of Die hermeneutische Wende: Disziplin und Sprachlosigkeit nach 1800 (1990); Framed Visions: Popular Culture, Americanization, and the Contemporary German and Austrian Imagination (1998), and A Foreign Affair: Billy Wilder's American Films (2008 - also published in Austria as Filmemacher mit Akzent: Billy Wilder in Hollywood). His volumes as editor include Wim Wenders: Einstellungen (1993); The Cinema of Wim Wenders (1997); Germans and Indians: Fantasies, Encounters, Projections (2002); Dietrich Icon (2007); and Culture in the Anteroom: The Legacies of Siegfried Kracauer (2012); as well as special issues of New German Critique on the director Rainer Werner Fassbinder and on Film and Exile. He serves on the editorial board of New German Critique and Film Criticism and is co-editor (with Johannes von Moltke '89) of the series "Screen Cultures" for Camden House.
His most recent book is Continental Strangers: German Exile Cinema, 1933-1951, which was published by Columbia University Press in 2014 (see: http://cup.columbia.edu/book/978-0-231-16678-2/).
His latest monograph, on the Argentine director Lucrecia Martel, is forthcoming in the Contemporary Film Directors series of Illinois University Press. He is currently writing a screenplay set in the Hollywood of the early 1960s.
Selected Publications
Continental Strangers: German Exiles in Hollywood, 1933-1951 (2014)
A Foreign Affair: Billy Wilder's American Films (2008)
“Hollywood in Altona: Minority Cinema and the Transnational Imagination,” in German Pop Culture , A Mueller (ed.) (2004) 180-190.
Germans and Indians: Fantasies, Encounters, Projections , edited with C Calloway and S Zantop, (2002).
Framed Visions: Popular Culture, Americanization, and the Contemporary German and Austrian Imagination , (1998).
Die hermeneutische Wende: Disziplin und Sprachlosigkeit nach 1800, (1990).
Works in Progress
Lucrecia Martel: Towards a Cinemaof Deceleration
The Berlin School in a Global Context: The Case of Argentina