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Elisabeth Bronfen (born 23 April 1958 in Munich) is a Swiss/German/American literary and cultural critic and academic. She is a professor emerita and former chairholder for English literature at the University of Zurich as well as a global distinguished professor at New York University. Her research interests include 19th- and 20th-century American and British literature, gender studies, psychoanalysis as well as the intersection and interaction between different cultural media. [1]
Elisabeth Bronfen studied German, English and Comparative literature at Radcliffe College and Harvard. From 1985 until 1992, she worked as an assistant at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich and wrote her doctorate on Dorothy Richardson's Pilgrimage novels as well as her habilitation Over Her Dead Body (1992). Bronfen hold a chair at the University of Zurich from 1993 to 2023.
In Over Her Dead Body (1992), Bronfen presents death as a fundamental deficit that is often negotiated over female bodies (be they dead or alive) in Western societies, citing Wuthering Heights , Frankenstein , and Vertigo . The literary and/or visual representation of death can therefore be read as a symptom of western culture, in which the female body epitomizes the Other whose death is imagined culturally.
In The Knotted Subject (1998), Bronfen relates the "elusive, protean, and enigmatic psychosomatic disorder" [2] of hysteria to cultural works by Ann Raddcliffe, Anne Sexton, Alfred Hitchcock, David Cronenberg, and Cindy Sherman. In her analysis, the human navel serves as a metaphor for both connection and detachment that is linked to the eponymous knotted subject of the hysteric because it too stems from a knot.
Home in Hollywood (1999/2004) is an analysis of the portrayal of psychological processes in film classics such as Rebecca , The Wizard of Oz , and The Searchers . In particular, Bronfen traces the depiction of the Freudian Uncanny in these films. Her main thesis is that a "knowledge of the uncanniness of existence" [3] remains visible in these movies despite their attempts of making sense of reality by giving the viewers a metaphorical home in the cinematic world.
In Specters of War (2012), Bronfen analyses how Hollywood cinema and American television come to terms with US military history. From the "unfinished business" [4] of civil war in Gone with the Wind and Gangs of New York to the "choreography of battle" [5] in Saving Private Ryan and Band of Brothers , Bronfen investigates the parallels between military and cinematic spectacle.
In Night Passages (2008/2013), Bronfen traces night as a trope from William Shakespeare through 19th-century realism to film noir and links the nocturnal to the primordial darkness that existed before the advent of in western culture’s "mythic narratives." [6]
Mad Men, Death and the American Dream (2015) is an analysis of Matthew Weiner’s award-winning TV show Mad Men . According to Bronfen, the show not only successfully revives the past, but also comments on the state of the US nation and the role of the American Dream in the 20th century. [7]
In 2018, Elisabeth Bronfen's collection of essays in visual culture Crossmappings (2009) appeared in English. Therein, Bronfen proposes a reading method of the same name that is based on mapping and comparing formal aspects of cultural texts such as character constellations or political themes. According to Bronfen, this method allows for new insights into both the earlier and the later text. Rolf Löchel calls crossmapping a comparative method that not only uncovers intertextualities but also carves out similar concerns of texts from different media such as literature, cinema, television and painting. [8] Amongst others, Bronfen crossmaps Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s novella The Yellow Wallpaper with the photographic oeuvre of Francesca Woodman, pop art with Baz Luhrmann’s Shakespeare adaption Romeo + Juliet , as well as Shakespeare’s Henriad with David Simon’s The Wire . In her teaching, Elisabeth Bronfen has further crossmapped Macbeth with Beau Willimon’s House of Cards [9] and traced the rewritings of A Midsummer Night's Dream in Hollywood from Max Reinhardt’s 1935 adaption via George Cukor’s The Philadelphia Story and Howard Hawks’ The Big Sleep to Susan Seidelman’s Desperately Seeking Susan . [10]
Emma Eckstein (1865–1924) was an Austrian author. She was "one of Sigmund Freud's most important patients and, for a short period of time around 1897, became a psychoanalyst herself". She has been described as "the first woman analyst", who became "both colleague and patient" for Freud. As analyst, while working mainly in the area of sexual and social hygiene, she also explored how 'daydreams, those "parasitic plants", invaded the life of young girls'.
Elaine Showalter is an American literary critic, feminist, and writer on cultural and social issues. She influenced feminist literary criticism in the United States academia, developing the concept and practice of gynocritics, a term describing the study of "women as writers".
Wheeler Winston Dixon is an American filmmaker and scholar. He is an expert on film history, theory and criticism. His scholarship has particular emphasis on François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, American experimental cinema and horror films. He has written extensively on numerous aspects of film, including his books A Short History of Film and A History of Horror. From 1999 through the end of 2014, he was co-editor, along with Gwendolyn Audrey Foster, of the Quarterly Review of Film and Video. He is regarded as a top reviewer of films. In addition, he is notable as an experimental American filmmaker with films made over several decades, and the Museum of Modern Art exhibited his works in 2003. He taught at Rutgers University, The New School in New York, the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands, and as of May 2020, is the James E. Ryan professor emeritus of film studies at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln.
Gwendolyn Audrey Foster is an experimental filmmaker, artist and author. She is Willa Cather Professor Emerita in Film Studies. Her work has focused on gender, race, ecofeminism, queer sexuality, eco-theory, and class studies. From 1999 through the end of 2014, she was co-editor along with Wheeler Winston Dixon of the Quarterly Review of Film and Video. In 2016, she was named Willa Cather Endowed Professor of English at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln and took early retirement in 2020.
Sandra M. Gilbert is an American literary critic and poet who has published in the fields of feminist literary criticism, feminist theory, and psychoanalytic criticism. She is best known for her collaborative critical work with Susan Gubar, with whom she co-authored, among other works, The Madwoman in the Attic (1979). Madwoman in the Attic is widely recognized as a text central to second-wave feminism. She is Professor Emerita of English at the University of California, Davis.
William Courtney Dowling is University Distinguished Professor of English and American Literature emeritus at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, specializing in 18th-century English literature, literature of the early American Republic, and Literary Theory.
Old Queens is the oldest extant building at Rutgers University and is the symbolic heart of the university's campus in New Brunswick in Middlesex County, New Jersey in the United States. Rutgers, the eighth-oldest college in the United States, was founded in 1766 during the American colonial period as Queen's College. Queen's College was named for Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, the daughter of a German duke who became the queen consort of British king George III. Old Queens is located on a six-acre hilltop city block bounded by Somerset Street, Hamilton Street, College Avenue and George Street that was previously an apple orchard. Donated to the college in 1807 by James Parker, Jr., this city block become known the Queen's Campus and is the historic core of the university. Because of this, by metonymy, the name "Old Queens" came to be used as a reference to Rutgers College and is often invoked as an allusive reference to the university or to its administration.
The Rutgers–Princeton Cannon War refers to a series of incidents involving two Revolutionary War cannons and a rivalry between the College of New Jersey in Princeton, New Jersey – now Princeton University – and Rutgers College – now Rutgers University – in New Brunswick, New Jersey.
Rachel Hadas is an American poet, teacher, essayist, and translator. Her most recent essay collection is Piece by Piece: Selected Prose, and her most recent poetry collection is Ghost Guest. Her honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, Ingram Merrill Foundation Grants, the O.B. Hardison Award from the Folger Shakespeare Library, and an Award in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.
Karl Kroeber was an American literary scholar, known for his writing on the English Romantics and American Indian literature. He was the son of Theodora and Alfred L. Kroeber, both anthropologists. He wrote an account of his father's work with Ishi called Ishi in Three Centuries.
John Belton is Professor Emeritus of English and Film at Rutgers University. He is editor of the Film and Culture series at Columbia University Press and associate editor of SMPTE's Motion Imaging Journal. He earned his PhD from Harvard University, BA from Columbia University, and specializes in film history and cultural studies. Belton has served on the National Film Preservation Board, as chair of the Board of Editors of the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers, and authored numerous books. In 2005/2006, he was granted a Guggenheim Fellowship to pursue his study of the use of digital technology in the film industry.
Cynthia Cruz is a contemporary American poet. She is the author of seven published poetry collections, and two works of cultural criticism. She currently teaches classes in the Graduate Writing Program at Columbia University.
Janet Staiger is the William P. Hobby Centennial Professor Emeritus of Communication in the Department of Radio-Television-Film and Professor Emeritus of Women's and Gender Studies at the University of Texas at Austin.
This is a bibliography of books by or about the director and actor Orson Welles.
Myra Jehlen is Board of Governors Professor of English at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey. She was awarded a Ph.D. from the Department of English at the University of California, Berkeley for her dissertation on William Faulkner, directed by Henry Nash Smith, a founding scholar of the field of American Studies. She holds a BA from City College of the City University of New York. She has taught at New York University, Columbia University, The State University of New York, College at Purchase, and the University of Pennsylvania. She has been a Woodrow Wilson Fellow, a Fellow of the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Humanities Center, and has received a Guggenheim Fellowship.
Joseph Vogl is a German philosopher who has written on literature, culture and media. He is professor of modern German literature, literary, media and cultural studies at the Humboldt University of Berlin.
Kirsten Moana Thompson is an interdisciplinary scholar of American and New Zealand/Pacific cinema and visual culture. Thompson's work in American film has focused on classical American cel animation and the introduction of three strip Technicolor, on contemporary crime films and blockbuster and special effects cinema. Her work on Pacific cinema situates film production by American and Pacific filmmakers in broader cultural and visual contexts. She has also published on American horror film and German cinema.
The 1948 Rutgers Queensmen football team represented Rutgers University in the 1948 college football season. In their seventh season under head coach Harvey Harman, the Queensmen compiled a 7–2 record, won the Middle Three Conference championship, and outscored their opponents 224 to 130.
Imani Perry is an American interdisciplinary scholar of race, law, literature, and African-American culture. She is currently the Henry A. Morss, Jr. and Elisabeth W. Morss Professor of Studies of Women, Gender and Sexuality and of African and African American Studies at Harvard University, a Carol K. Pforzheimer Professor at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute, and a columnist for The Atlantic. Perry won the 2022 National Book Award for Nonfiction for South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation. In October 2023, she was named a MacArthur Fellow.
Claus Pias is a German media theorist and media historian. He is a professor for history and epistemology of media at the Institute for Culture and Aesthetics of Digital Media (ICAM) at Leuphana University in Lueneburg., Germany.
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