About the Faculty

Katie Trumpener
katie.trumpener@yale.edu

Katie Trumpener (Professor, Comparative Literature, English, and Film Studies)
works on the history of the European novel; 20th century Germany; European cinema (especially Central and Eastern Europe); British literature and culture from the Enlightenment to the present; European modernism; German-Eastern European relations; Marxist aesthetics; colonial and postcolonial literature (esp. Canada); Scottish, and Irish literature; children's literature; historiography; European regionalism; visual culture.

Her forthcoming book, The Divided Screen: The Cinemas of Postwar Germany (Princeton University Press) offers the first full-length comparison of the East and West German cinemas. It focuses particularly on genres and counter-genres, audience and spectatorship, Cold War sectarianism and cosmopolitanism.

Her first book, Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire (Princeton University Press, 1997) used a comparative approach to "English" literature, tracing the ways literary forms developed in Ireland and Scotland shaped the early literary life of British settler colonies. The book was awarded the Modern Language Association Prize for a First Book and the British Academy's Rose Mary Crawshay Prize.

She is working on a new comparative project on European modernists and their representations of childhood (often autobiographically inflected; the book will discuss not only literary modernism but also painting, film and music.
She plans further books on Romantic and modernist children's literature and on 19th century panoramic painting.

She coedited Modern Philology 1995-2003, and currently serves on the editorial boards of Public Culture, New German Critique, and English Studies in Canada.

She was educated in Canada, the United States, and West Germany, receiving her AM from Harvard in English and American Literature (in 1983), and her PhD from Stanford in Comparative Literature (in 1990).