Theresia Susanne Kord, or T. S. Kord is a scholar of women's studies, literary studies and film studies, and the author of 11 books and 70 scholarly articles published in four languages. [1]
Theresia Susanne Kord, or T. S. Kord is a scholar of women's studies, literary studies and film studies, and the author of 11 books and 70 scholarly articles published in four languages. [1]
Kord has been a professor at University College London since 2004, [2] where she is the Chair of German. She was a visiting fellow at the All Souls College, Oxford; [2] visiting scholar at the St John's College, Oxford; [2] and a visiting professor the University of Edinburgh. [2]
Kord was elected Fellow of the British Academy in 2021; [3] Fellow of the British Royal Historical Society in 2015; [4] and Honorary Secretary and Council Member of the English branch of the Goethe Society in 2008. [5]
Kord spent 16 years as an academic in the United States: with tenured positions at Georgetown University (Washington, D.C., 1993-2004), where she was George M. Roth Distinguished Professor; [1] and at the University of Cincinnati (Ohio, 1990–93). [1] She was also visiting lecturer at Dartmouth College in the United States from 1988-1990. [1]
Kord earned an M.A. degree in English and American literature at Philipps Universität Marburg (Germany), [1] and an M.A. and PhD in German literature (1990) at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst (United States). [1]
Kord's first two books, written in German, focused on little-known female German authors of the 18th and 19th centuries. Her 1992 book, Ein Blick hinter die Kulissen (A Glance Backstage, 1992 [6] ), was the first comprehensive historical study of eighteenth- and nineteenth century women playwrights and is credited with the rediscovery of many of these writers. [7] [8] [9] The work won Swiss National Radio's Best Book of the Year Award in 1993. Her 1996 book, Sich einen Namen machen (Making a Name for Herself [10] ), delved into eighteenth- and nineteenth century women writers' strategies of using pseudonyms to conceal their gender.
Kord's interests branched out in the early 2000s into Comparative Literature and Film Studies and she began to publish in English. She explored subjects ranging from 18th-century women peasant poets in Germany and the British Isles, [11] real-life and fictional murderesses in 18th century Germany, [12] gender in Hollywood films, [13] [14] time travel in science fiction films [15] and philosophy in modern horror films [16] [17] to the rise of antisemitism in Germany and Austria before both World Wars. [18]
Kord has translated the works of little-known female authors from German to English, including the naturalist playwright Elsa Bernstein [19] and Goethe associate, playwright and novelist Charlotte von Stein. [20] Her literary translations of dramatic plays from German to English include Elsa Bernstein's Dämmerung (1893), published as 'Twilight', [21] and Bernstein's drama Maria Arndt (1908), [22] performed at the Steppenwolf Theatre in Chicago, March 2002. [23]
In the 1990s, Kord published poetry in English and German in various journals, holding public readings at the German Embassy in Washington, D.C. In 1994, she was awarded the Robert L. Kahn Lyrik-Preis by the Society for Contemporary American Literature in German, for her poem ‘grammatik’ [24] (published in Trans-Lit, 1994). [25] The themes of Kord’s published poetry draw on her professional research on challenges faced by female authors, and on the poverty she observed in Cincinnati and Washington, D.C. neighborhoods.
Kord sometimes employs a gender-concealing alias. Her books Little Horrors (2016) and Lovable Crooks (2018) were published under the gender-neutral author name T. S. Kord, leading some reviewers of both works to assume she was male. [26]
Kord has won six awards for her writing, including the 2012 Choice Outstanding Academic Title of the Year (for her book with Elisabeth Krimmer, Contemporary Hollywood Masculinities) [27] and the Forum Prize, Best Article of the Year, for The Rule of Law and the Role of Literature: German Public Debates on Husband Killers and Human Rights, Forum for Modern Language Studies, (January 2012). [28] [29]
Kord's scholarship, which originated in the effort to make lost work by women accessible to a modern readership, employs a straightforward writing style that is often noted in reviews. [30] [31] This has on occasion put her at odds with the idea that "academic communication is fundamentally different from everyday vernacular discourse." [32] Kord holds that serious scholarship is not compromised by approachable language: "I've never been a fan of the academic credo that if a book is comprehensible to more than three people, the author must have sold out." [33]
The word cisgender describes a person whose gender identity corresponds to their sex assigned at birth, i.e., someone who is not transgender. The prefix cis- is Latin and means on this side of. The term cisgender was coined in 1994 as an antonym to transgender, and entered into dictionaries starting in 2015 as a result of changes in social discourse about gender. The term has been and continues to be controversial and subject to critique.
Elfriede Jelinek is an Austrian playwright and novelist. She is one of the most decorated authors to write in German and was awarded the 2004 Nobel Prize in Literature for her "musical flow of voices and counter-voices in novels and plays that, with extraordinary linguistic zeal, reveal the absurdity of society's clichés and their subjugating power". She is considered to be among the most important living playwrights of the German language.
Elsa Baroness von Freytag-Loringhoven was a German-born avant-garde visual artist and poet, who was active in Greenwich Village, New York, from 1913 to 1923, where her radical self-displays came to embody a living Dada. She was considered one of the most controversial and radical women artists of the era.
Elsa Bernstein was an Austrian-German writer, dramatist, and literary figure.
Illness or Modern Women is a play by the Austrian playwright Elfriede Jelinek. It was published in 1984 in the avant-garde journal manuscripte of Graz and premiered on the stage of the Schauspielhaus Bonn on February 12, 1987, directed by Hans Hollmann. The play was published in book form by Prometh Verlag in 1987 with an afterword by Regine Friedrich. The title "parodically conflates women with illness." The play is based on an earlier, shorter radio play by Jelinek called Erziehung eines Vampirs, which appeared in 1986 on Süddeutscher Rundfunk.
Gesina ("Gesche") Margarethe Gottfried was a German serial killer who murdered 15 people by arsenic poisoning in Bremen and Hanover, Germany, between 1813 and 1827. She was the final person to be publicly executed in the city of Bremen.
Friederike Sophie Seyler was a German actress, playwright and librettist. Alongside Friederike Caroline Neuber, she was widely considered Germany's greatest actress of the 18th century; Gotthold Ephraim Lessing described her in his Hamburg Dramaturgy as "incontestably one of the best actresses that German theatre has ever seen."
Susanne Rode-Breymann is a German musicologist, and from 2010 until March 2024 the president of the Hochschule für Musik, Theater und Medien in Hanover.
Transgender studies, also called trans studies or trans* studies, is an interdisciplinary field of academic research dedicated to the study of gender identity, gender expression, and gender embodiment, as well as to the study of various issues of relevance to transgender and gender variant populations. Interdisciplinary subfields of transgender studies include applied transgender studies, transgender history, transgender literature, transgender media studies, transgender anthropology and archaeology, transgender psychology, and transgender health. The research theories within transgender studies focus on cultural presentations, political movements, social organizations and the lived experience of various forms of gender nonconformity. The discipline emerged in the early 1990s in close connection to queer theory. Non-transgender-identified peoples are often also included under the "trans" umbrella for transgender studies, such as intersex people, crossdressers, drag artists, third gender individuals, and genderqueer people.
Elsa Neumann was a German physicist. She was the first woman to receive a PhD in physics from the University of Berlin, in 1899.
Clara Bertha Friederike von Bülow was a German writer of short stories, comedies and farces.
Helga W. Kraft, is a German-American Professor of Germanic Studies, Emerita.
Maria Anna Walburga Lämmerhirt was a German painter, drafter, travel writer, and lady-in-waiting. Through her diary, Für mich gemerkt auf meiner Reise nach Italien 1791, she contributed to travel literature.
Margarethe Carl was the stage name of Margarethe Bernbrunn, a German soprano and actress.
Anna Therese Friederike von Zandt zu Reichartshausen was a German pianist and singer. She was the mother of the composers Friedrich Burgmüller and Norbert Burgmüller.
Krassimira Daskalova is a Bulgarian academic and pioneer in gender studies. She served as editor of L'Homme: European Journal of Feminist History from 2003 to 2011 and is co-editor of Aspasia since 2007. Between 2005 and 2010 she was president of the International Federation for Research in Women's History.
Peggy Piesche is a German literary and cultural scientist, works in adult education and works as a consultant for diversity, intersectionality and decoloniality in the Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung. Peggy Piesche is one of the most famous voices of Black women in Germany. Her identities also include lesbian.
Elise (Sara) Henle Levi was a German Jewish writer, dramatist, and poet. She was the author of numerous dramatic comedies, opera libretti, poems, and cookbooks.
Pauline Maria Juliane von Brochowska was a German woman writer.
Elisabeth Krimmer is an American academic whose work has focused on war and gender studies in German literature and society. Inspired by her mother's silence on the subject of war in German history, Krimmer's work has focused on uncovering the roles and experiences of women in war. Among her works are books exploring women who dressed as men to become soldiers and books which collected women's remembrances as victims and perpetrators of the The Holocaust. She has also written works evaluating women's roles as depicted in film and in leadership positions. She co-wrote with Susanne Kord Contemporary Hollywood Masculinities: Gender, Genre, and Politics, which was selected as a Choice Outstanding Academic Titles of the Association of College and Research Libraries in 2012.
