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Anke Pinkert

Director of Undergraduate Studies, Associate Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures
Russian, East European, and Eurasian
Comparative and World Literature
Media and Cinema Studies

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Contact Information:

  • Address:
    3128 Foreign Languages Building
    • Office Hours:
    • W 12:30-2:30pm
  • Telephone: (217) 244-0605
  • Email:

Education

Ph.D. University of Chicago

Specializations / Research Interests

Modern German culture, literature, and film; Holocaust studies, Humanities education, mass incarceration

Biography

Anke Pinkert holds an M.A. degree from the Martin-Luther-Universität Halle, Germany (1989) and a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago (2000). Before joining the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures at Illinois in 2000, she taught courses in German Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of Chicago and at Macalester College, MN. In 2001, Professor Pinkert was the recipient of the Giles Whiting Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Humanities at the University of Chicago.

Anke's research and teaching is currently situated within two major areas -- 20th/21st century German/ Memory Studies and Theories/Practice of Humanities Education. Focusing on the aftermath of two turning points in modern German and European history, “1945” and “1989,” her scholarship explores reparative modes of loss and healing. Her book Memory and Film in East Germany (Indiana UP, 2008) offers an understanding of how East German film transformed the historical experience of war violence and mass death into an elegiac public memory. Her current book project "New Vision: Postcommunist Travel and Displacement" focuses on notions of global ethical responsibility in transcultural post-1989 narratives.

In her second major area of interest, Anke explores and researches the transformative effects of a holistically oriented Humanities education. She is an instructor and active member of the Education Justice Project at the University of Illinois http://www.educationjustice.net. Based on her teaching experience, she is currently conducting an IRB approved research study on Holocaust education in prison. Anke is interested in developing alternative pedagogies and research agendas that cultivate an
integration of scholarship and experience, research and teaching, reflection and service. For more information and current projects see her website.

At the University of Illinois, she teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on 20th century German literature, film, and culture; critical theory; the Holocaust; contemporary American movies and mass incarceration in the media.

Publications

Books

  • Pinkert, Anke. Film and Memory in East Germany. Bloomington, IL: Indiana University Press, 2008.
  • Pinkert, Anke. Literary Intellectuals, Resistance, and the East German State: Legitimation and Dissent in the Works of Christa Wolf and Franz Fühmann . University of Chicago: Dissertation, 2000.

Book Contributions

  • Pinkert, Anke. "Vacant History, Empty Screens: German Postcommunist Films of the 1990s." Postcommunist Nostalgia. Comp. Maria Todorova, Matti Bunzl, and Zsusza Gille. New York: Berghahn Books, 2010.
  • "Rubble Film as Archive of Trauma and Grief: Wolfgang Lamprecht’s “Somewhere In Berlin." German Postwar Films: Life and Love in the Ruins. Comp. Wilfried Willms. Ed. William Rasch. New York: Palgrave, 2008. 61-76.

Journal Articles

  • Pinkert, Anke. "Rethinking the Humanities through Teaching the Holocaust in Prison." Studies in Law, Politics, and Society forthcoming.Special Issue "The Beautiful Prison," ed. Doran Larson (2012):
  • "Can Melodrama Cure?: War Trauma and Crisis of Masculinity in Early DEFA Film." Seminar: a Journal of Germanic Studies (special issue: “Discourses of Masculinity in German Literature and Film”) 44.1 (2008): 118-36.
  • Pinkert, Anke. "Waste Matters: Defilement and Postfascist Discourse in Works by Franz Fühmann." Germanic Review, 80.3 (2005): 254-74.
  • "Pleasures of Fear: Antifascist Myth, Holocaust, and Soft Dissidence in Christa Wolf’s Kindheitsmuster." German Quarterly 76.1 (2003): 25-37.
  • Pinkert, Anke. "Postcolonial Legacies”: the Rhetoric of Race in the East/West German National Identity Debate of the Late 1990s." German Quarterly 76.1 (2003): 25-37.
  • Pinkert, Anke. "Excessive Conversions: Antifascism, Holocaust, and State Dissidence in Franz Fühmann’s “Das Judenauto." Seminar: a Journal of Germanic Studies 38.2 (2002): 142-53.

Courses

  • Memory and Ethics of Healing in Post-1989 Literature, GER 575/CWL 593
  • Prison Break: Incarceration and Justice in the Movies and Public Media, GER/MACS 199 (Discovery Course)