Hester Baer

Candidate statement

Hester Baer (PhD, Washington University, 2000) is Associate Professor of German and Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park, where she also serves as a core faculty member in the Comparative Literature Program. Her research and teaching focus on German cinema and media, feminist theory, and environmental humanities. She is the author of numerous articles and book chapters and of German Cinema in the Age of Neoliberalism (2021) and Dismantling the Dream Factory: Gender, German Cinema, and the Postwar Quest for a New Film Language (2009); co-editor of German Women’s Writing in the Twenty-First Century (2015); and co-editor and translator of Nanda Herbermann, The Blessed Abyss: Inmate #6582 in Ravensbrück Concentration Camp for Women (2000). Her current projects include a monograph on West Germany’s first feminist film, Ula Stöckl’s Neun Leben hat die Katze (1968), and two co-edited volumes, Nuclear Futures in the Post-Fukushima Age and Babylon Berlin. Baer is the recipient of grants from the DAAD and the Fulbright Commission. She has served as the President of the Coalition of Women in German and of the South Central Modern Language Association. She is currently co-editor of the journal Feminist German Studies. Baer has been a regular participant at GSA conferences since 2001. Since 2016, she has served on the Editorial Board of Spektrum: Publications of the German Studies Association.