Katherine Trumpener

Biography

 

Katie Trumpener has taught at Yale since 2002. From 1990-2002, she taught at he University of Chicago. She works and teaches courses on the history of the European novel, 20th century Germany, European cinema (esp. Central, Eastern and Northern Europe); post-Enlightenment British literature and culture; Communist aesthetics; Anglophone colonial/ postcolonial literature; children’s literature; historiography; European regionalism; visual culture.

Her first book, Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire (Princeton University Press, 1997) used a comparative approach to “English” literature, tracing how literary forms developed in Ireland and Scotland shaped the early literary life of Canada and other British settler colonies. It was awarded the Modern Language Association Prize for a First Book and the British Academy’s Rose Mary Crawshay Prize.
The Viewing Platform: New Perspectives on the Panorama (co-edited with Timothy Barringer, to be published by Yale University Press) explores nineteenth-century panorama paintings and their influence on twentieth-century film, installation art and museology.

The Divided Screen: The Cinemas of Postwar Germany (to be published by Princeton University Press), the first full-length comparison of the East and West German cinemas, focuses on genres and counter-genres, audience and spectatorship, Cold War sectarianism and cosmopolitanism.
She is working on a new comparative project on European modernists and their representations of childhood in literature, painting, film and music, as on a book of essays about Romantic and modernist children’s literature.

She co-edited Modern Philology 1995-2003, served on the Editorial Collective of Public Culture 1995-2010, and currently serves on the editorial boards of Public Culture, New German Critique, German Quarterly, and English Studies in Canada.

She was educated in Canada, the United States, and West Germany. From 1990-2002, she taught at the University of Chicago. She received Yale’s Graduate Mentoring Award, and has held Humboldt, Mellon, ACLS, American Academy in Berlin, Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, and Stanford Humanities Center fellowships. 
 

Education

B.A. (honours), University of Alberta, Canada
A.M., English and American Literature, Harvard
Ph.D. Comparative Literature, Stanford
 

Publication Highlights

Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire. Princeton UP, 1997.
 
The Cambridge Companion to Fiction of the Romantic Period, co-edited with Richard Maxwell. Cambridge University Press, 2008.
 
“On Living in Time.” Periodization. Essays from the English Institute, ed. Virginia Jackson. ACLA Ebook, 2010.
 
“The Arabian Nights, Arab-European Literary Influence, and the Lineages of the Novel,” with Rebecca Johnson and Richard Maxwell. Special Issue on Globalization, MLQ 68:2 (June 2007): 243–79.
 
“World Music, World Literature. A Geopolitical View.” Comparative Literature in an Age of Globalization. ed. Haun Saussy. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006, 185–202.
 
“Old Movies: The Cinema as Palimpsest in GDR Literature,” New German Critique 82: Special Issue on East German Film, Winter 2001, 39–76.
 

Work in Progress

“The Divided Screen: The Cinemas of Postwar Germany” (under contract, Princeton University Press)

“The Viewing Platform: Panoramic Vistas”, coed. Timothy Barringer (under contract, Yale University Press)

“Nurse’s Song: Modernism in the Nursery”

 
Research Interests: 
Cultural History
English and Anglophone Literature
Fiction
Film
German
Modernism
Nineteenth-Century
Working Languages: 
French
German