Background
Rebecca Schäfer is a lecturer and scholar of German Studies. She initially joined Binghamton as a DAAD visiting lecturer in 2022/23. At Binghamton, she teaches the first two years of the German language curriculum as well as courses on German literature and culture. Prior to joining Binghamton, she taught for more than eight years at the Obama Institute at Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz (Germany). She holds a Ph.D. 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. Her areas of specialization are film and media studies as well as gender, sexuality and diversity studies, which she applies across German-speaking and transnational contexts. She is further interested in the dialogue between cultural studies and the psychological humanities, especially cultural psychology. 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
- Film and media studies
- Gender, queer and sexuality studies
- Psychological humanities, medical humanities
- Practices of antiproductivity, especially through “unproductive” temporal states and concepts (boredom, bad timing, slowness, melancholia, nostalgia and grief)
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
- Transnational cultural studies
