Background
Rebecca Schäfer is a scholar of German Studies. Her areas of specialization are queer, sexuality and gender studies, diversity studies, critical theory, and film studies, which she applies across German-speaking and transnational contexts. At Binghamton, she teaches courses on queer and gender representation in German film history or critical theory, including courses on Marx, Nietzsche and Freud. She also teaches the first two years of the German language curriculum. Before joining Binghamton as a DAAD visiting lecturer (2022/23), she taught for 8 years at the Obama Institute for Transnational American Studies at Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz (Germany). She holds a PhD in American Studies, as well as an MA in American Studies, German Studies and Applied German Linguistics.
Published as a monograph in 2021 with Universitätsverlag Winter (Heidelberg), her dissertation was awarded the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz Award. She is an alumna of the Harvard Institute for World Literature (IWL).
Education
- PhD, Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz (Germany)
- MA, BA, Universität Siegen (Germany), American Studies, German Studies, and Applied German Linguistics
Research Interests
- Queer, sexuality and gender studies
- Temporality studies and practices of antiproductivity, especially through “unproductive” temporal states and concepts (boredom, bad timing, slowness, melancholia, nostalgia and grief)
- Psychological humanities and medical humanities
Teaching Interests
- German language, literature and culture
- Gender theory and gender studies in the age of #MeToo
- Queer studies in theory and practice in the 20th and 21st century
- Film and visual culture, especially contemporary German post-migrant and queer cinema
- Critical theory
- Transnational cultural studies
