Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Biography

Stephanie M. Hilger is an associate professor of German and Comparative Literature. She was born in Belgium, in an area close to the German border, called the “Deutschsprachige Gemeinschaft Belgiens." Although the German-speaking minority accounts for only 0.6% of Belgium’s total population, German has the status of an official language (besides French and Dutch) and the German-speaking regional government is in charge of its own educational system, culture, etc. She received a BA in German and English language and literature from the Université de Liège (Belgium). She then came to the US, where she earned an MA in English and then a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Illinois. After receiving her PhD, she moved to Massachusetts to teach in a tenure-track position at College of the Holy Cross. In the fall of 2004, she returned to Illinois, where she now teaches courses in German and Comparative Literature.

Her research focuses on gender, class, and race in British, French, and German literature from the eighteenth century to the present day. She is particularly interested in the ways in which current literary and cultural theory can be used for the analysis of eighteenth-century literature. Her book Women Write Back: Strategies of Response and the Dynamics of European Literary Culture, 1790 1805 (2009) explores the ways in which late eighteenth and early nineteenth century women authors rewrote and responded to texts written earlier in the century by male intellectuals. Using a postcolonial model of analysis, she investigates the strategies that these women writers used in order to publish their writings while entering into dialogue with famous – and by now, canonical -- works of literature.

Her second book project, “The Warrior and the Traveler: Women in the French Revolution” examines German literary texts that depict and represent women as political agents during the French Revolution. The book focuses on the thirty-year period following the Revolution – a time when censorship limited French writing about the Revolution and the Napoleonic Empire continued the erosion of women’s rights that had begun during the Reign of Terror with the banning of women’s political clubs and the executions of important figures such as Charlotte Corday, Marie Antoinette, Olympe de Gouges, and Marie-Jeanne Roland.

Professor Hilger currently holds a fellowship from the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities for her new book project, “Liminal Bodies: Intersexuality in Literary and Medical Discourses.” This project investigates the literary and medical representation of individuals born with ambiguous genitalia from eighteenth-century Europe to present-day America. This interdisciplinary study explores the discursive intersection between the medical and legal mémoire and the autobiographical memoir and traces the related shift from the intersex individual as a silent object of medical science and legal discourse to a speaking subject in charge of his/her self-representation. The shifting boundaries of the intersex body comment not only on gendered perceptions of individual identity but also on the gendered construction of the body politic, which undergoes momentous changes from the French Revolution to the twenty-first century.

Publications

Courses

• GER 212: German Conversation and Writing II
• GER 331: Introduction to German Literature, Part I
• GER 496: Swiss Literature
• GER 573: Eighteenth-Century Studies: Democracy, Dialogue and Dissent
• CWL 201: Comparative Literary Studies, I
• CWL 241: Literature of Europe and the Americas, Part I
• CWL 450/ENG 461/GWS 450: Gender Benders
• CWL 471/GWS 490: Love, Lust, and Language: Women in the Eighteenth Century
• CWL 581: Seductive Violence in the Eighteenth Century: Libertines, Murderers, and Revolutionaries