Fatima Naqvi
Fatima Naqvi is Professor in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures at Yale University. She received her B.A. from Dartmouth College in 1993 and her Ph.D. from Harvard University in 2000. From 2000–2019, she taught at Rutgers University. She is on the board of the ICI Berlin as well as the Botstiber Institute for Austrian-American Studies.
Her research interests include the intersection of architecture and literature/film; ecological films; Austrian authors and filmmakers of the 20th and 21st centuries; affect studies; and landscape in the post-1945 period. One current book project focuses on the topic of fremdschämen—the sense of shame for another—in contemporary media culture, with special attention to the works of Ulrich Seidl, Erwin Wurm, and Elfriede Jelinek. A second project delves into hospitals; it looks at the way in which we experience them in the 20th and 21st centuries.
Fatima Naqvi’s books include The Literary and Cultural Rhetoric of Victimhood: Western Europe 1970-2005 (2007), Trügerische Vertrautheit: Filme von Michael Haneke/ Deceptive Familiarity: Films by Michael Haneke (2010), and How We Learn Where We Live: Thomas Bernhard, Architecture, and Bildung (2016). A German Film Classics-volume on Michael Haneke’s film The White Ribbon appeared in 2020, as well as her co-edited volume Michael Haneke: Interviews (with Roy Grundmann and Colin Root). In 2021, she published The Insulted Landscape: Postwar German Culture 1960–1995 with Königshausen and Neumann.
Currently she and co-editor Andrea Grill are putting out a Literatur+Kritik dossier on the fear of hospitals (with works by Friederike Mayröcker, Marlene Streeruwitz, Michael Stavaric, Margret Kreidl, etc.). Essays on film criticism in Austria (“Kakanian Flyspecks”) and the documentary filmmaker Nikolaus Geyrhalter (“Ephemeral Spaces and Pneumatic Architecture”) appeared in New German Critique. An article on Ulrich Seidl and “fremdschämen” came out in Film-Konzepte.
Professor Naqvi teaches on 20th and 21st century German culture. Her courses include Literature and Architecture; Vienna 1900–1930; From Haunted Screen to Hyperreality: Classics of German Cinema; Our Threatened Planet: Green Thought from the German-Speaking World; Weimar Cinema; Landscape, Architecture, Film; German Film after 1945.
She has held guest professorships at Harvard University (2017) and the Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz (2013).