Cultural Studies/Germanistik Member

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.

B. Venkat Mani (PhD, Stanford University, 2001) is Professor of German and World Literature and past director of the Center for South Asia at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His research focuses on two connected approaches to Migration Studies. The first comprises investigations of literatures of migrants and minorities in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The second constitutes construction of world literature through the concept of Bibliomigrancy. Representative of these two lines of inquiry are his monographs Cosmopolitical Claims: Turkish German Literatures from Nadolny to Pamuk (University of Iowa Press, 2007) and Recoding World Literature: Libraries, Print Culture, and Germany’s Pact with Books (Fordham UP, 2017; winner of GSA DAAD Prize and MLA’s Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Best Book in German Studies) and more recently, as co-editor, A Companion to World Literature (Wiley Blackwell 2020). Mani has received fellowships and grants from the Social Science Research Council for a Public Humanities Project for Wisconsin Public Radio on “Inside Islam, Dialogue and Debates”; the Andrew Mellon Foundation’s Sawyer Seminar Grant for “Bibliomigrancy: World Literature in the Public Sphere,” Alexander von Humboldt Foundation’s Experienced Researcher Fellowship for Recoding World Literature. He is also part of UW-Madison’s “Just Futures” project on Humanities Education for Anti-Racist Literacy (HEAL). Starting AY 2021, he will be a Race, Ethnicity and Indigeneity Fellow at the Institute for Research in the Humanities at UW-Madison working on his book project on refuge and forced migration. Mani has participated in every GSA conference since 2005 and has worked with research networks, seminars and organized panel series. He was Chair of the GSA-DAAD Book Prize Committee (2020) and is currently a member of GSA’s first committee on Equity, Diversity and Inclusion.