This course explores possibilities and pitfalls of empathy in cinema and other audiovisual media. Focusing on cinematic framings of migration and visualizations of global connection, it analyzes how movement, borders, and settlement figure in different genres and formats.
In spring 2016, the Dutch Studies Program at the German Department and the Bancroft Library partnered in a collaborative research grant through Digital Humanities to prepare a digital research collection from selected primary source materials in the Engel Sluiter Historical Documents Collection at The Bancroft Library. This collection consists predominantly of copies and transcriptions of primary source materials on the seventeenth-century Atlantic.
n times of post-truth politics, this course focuses on imposter tales, analyzing performances of social roles and national identities across multiple media and genres. Considering classic tales of “clothes make the man” from H. C. Andersen and F. Kafka, films such as Imitation of Life and Catch Me If You Can, as well as acts of posing and exposing on TV, YouTube, and digital social media platforms, students learn to think critically about rank and power, authenticity and artifice, staging and acting. Theories on the presentation of self and framing social interaction will guide our analyses. Epitomized by the word “selfie,” “selling the self” is an all-encompassing social practice that governs life and politics.
This seminar will read theories of old and new media through the lens of two conceptual frameworks environmental criticism and migration studies. Tracing the effects of movement and stillness, interaction and connectivity from early cinema to social media and new forms of data visualizations, participants will develop their own research projects and methodologies by relating questions arising from theory to practice.
Christopher is a PhD candidate in German Literature and Culture and Medieval Studies. His research interests are primarily in medieval epics and Minnesang, economic thinking and literature, and tools of the Digital Humanities. One project he is currently working on is SyllabiPy, a Python program that syllabifies historical languages.
This website provides a research hub for those interested in early film theory. It serves as a supplement to the sourcebook The Promise of Cinema: German Film Theory, 1907-1933, which brings together hundreds of texts by theorists, intellectuals, and filmmakers, documenting the early twentieth century’s efforts to assimilate modernity’s most powerful medium. Users will find a collation of German film-theoretical publications before 1933, links to films as well as suggestions for researching and teaching Weimar cinema.
TRANSIT Journal is the first refereed, multidisciplinary online journal dedicated to the critical inquiry of travel, migration, and multiculturalism in the German-speaking world. As a web-based, multimedia production, TRANSIT pushes boundaries both of traditional scholarship and of print publication. We publish one issue over the course of a year in several rounds of publication, allowing for new submissions throughout the year. Each issue also contains an open forum for experimental work and review essays on relevant books.
SyllabiPy was created by Alex Estes and Christopher Hench at the University of California, Berkeley in 2015. Alex and Christopher are graduate students in the German Department interested in linguistic forces operating in literature, and the tools of the Digital Humanities.