简介

Jennifer Kapczynski is Associate Professor in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures at Washington University in St. Louis. She received her Ph.D. in German from the University of California, Berkeley in 2003. Professor Kapczynski’s research focuses principally on twentieth century literature and film. Her monograph The German Patient: Crisis and Recovery in Postwar Culture appeared with University of Michigan Press in 2008. The book examines the place of disease in discussions of German guilt after 1945, and demonstrates that illness provided a key framework for postwar thinkers attempting to explain the emergence and impact of fascism. She has published articles on a range of subjects, from the writings of Heinrich Böll to Heinrich von Kleist, from American war films to post-unification German cinema. Her current book project, Leading Men, explores the reconstruction of masculinity in West German cinema of the 1950s. In support of this research, she received a Fulbright research grant for Fall 2008 and a fellowship with Washington University’s Center for the Humanities for Spring 2009. Professor Kapczynski’s broader research and teaching interests include nineteenth through twenty-first century literature, film studies, gender theory, and nationalism. She has taught courses on German Literature of the Modern Era, German Modernism, the post-1945 “Zero Hour,” History of German Cinema, War Film, and German Cinema of the 1950s.