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German and Russian Studies @ the  University of Missouri451 Strickland Hall | Columbia, MO 65211-4170 email: grs@missouri.edu | phone: 573-882-4328 | fax: 573-884-8456 |
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Faculty | Kopp
Kristin Kopp |
Assistant Professor of German and Polish - German Post / Memory: Aesthetics, Ethics, Politics Conference (April 19-22, 2007) ResearchThe three major areas of my research and publication are German-Polish relations, German colonialism, and German film. Germany's complex history with Eastern Europe has long fascinated me, particularly the means by which various media have been employed in constructing both cultural and political relationships of inequality. My current book project presents the argument that Germans adapted conceptual categories drawn from a European colonial paradigm in legitimizing expansionist aims in the East. Further projects extend these interests in the transferability of colonial paradigms. Die Großstadt und das Primitive: Text, Politik, Repräsentation, which I co-edited with Klaus Müller-Richter, investigates the ways in which tropes of the colonized "primitive" were applied in the mental mapping of modern urban space at the turn of the last century. An article on Caroline Link's 2001 Oscar-winning film, Nirgendwo in Afrika addresses the extent to which such primitivist tropes are still mobilized in service of contemporary cultural politics, as Germany seeks to locate its position in a post-Wall global landscape. This imagined space of the nation will be the subject of my next book project, Mapping Germany, in which I plan to investigate various historical contestations of Germany's rightful borders and the means by which maps drafted in the context of these debates strove to bring conflicting models of nationhood into visual representation. Work in ProgressI am currently on a year-long research leave funded by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. I'm living in Berlin and affiliated with the European University Viadrina, which is located on the German-Polish border just a short hour away by train. My main project is a book I am writing on the ways in which Germans came to imagine Eastern Europe (specifically Polish areas) as their own space for colonial adventure and conquest between 1848 and 1945. I'm interested in showing how these colonial fantasies accompanied real acts of territorial aggression, most specifically the real invasion and colonization of Poland during the Second World War. I'm also co-editing two additional books, the first of which is a reproduction of Peter Altenberg's Ashantee, a text he initially published in 1897 about his experience in the "people shows" (in which groups of "primitive peoples" from overseas were put on display in European zoos). My co-editor and I think that this book, which has been out of print for a century, is the most important literary treatment of the "people shows," and we include a series of articles to help readers understand the text and the historical mass cultural practice it depicts. The second edited volume treats the ways in which Germans and Poles have instrumentalized memories of the past (i.e. the atrocities perpetrated against the Poles in the Second World War and the subsequent forced expulsion of Germans from Poland after the war) to support various political and ethical causes during the Cold War and after. TeachingI mostly enjoy teaching courses that give students the opportunity to engage in critical intellectual discussions about literary and filmic representations and the ways in which they work to shape our understandings of the worlds they present. All of the courses in the "German Classics" series are favorites in this regard. I am also personally invested in teaching courses that make contemporary Germany relevant and accessible to students with a wide range of German and non-German backgrounds (I'm hoping to thereby convince many of you to study or work abroad!). I therefore teach 4160 using a selection of recent films depicting social issues confronting Germans in post-unification society. Similarly, in my courses on multiculturalism, we investigate the immigration and integration of a largely Muslim population in postwar Germany; in addressing the problems confronted and the successes achieved, I hope to offer students a conceptual framework for understanding some of the political and cultural issues at stake in the larger global arena. I typically teach:
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Recent PublicationsPlease see my c.v. for the full listing. BooksPeter Altenberg, Kristin Kopp, and Werner Michael Schwarz. Ashantee: Afrika und Wien um 1900 (Vienna: Löcker Verlag) 2008. Kristin Kopp and Klaus Müller-Richter, eds. Die Großstadt und das Primitive. Text, Politik, Repräsentation (Stuttgart: Metzler Verlag) 2004. Articles"Gustav Freytag's Soll und Haben als imperiales Kartenwerk" in Magdalena Marszałek and Sylvia Sasse, eds., Geopoetik: Literatur und Geographie [Publication expected 2008]. "Reinventing Poland as German Colonial Territory in the Nineteenth Century: Gustav Freytag's Soll und Haben [Debit and Credit, 1855] as Colonial Novel" in Robert Nelson, ed., "We could colonize continents!": Germans, Poland and Expansion to the East, 1850-2000 [Publication expected 2008 with Palgrave] "Gray Zones: On the Inclusion of "Poland" in the Study of German Colonialism," in Michael Perraudin and Jürgen Zimmerer, eds.: German Colonialism and National Identity [Publication expected 2008 with Routledge] "Christoph Hochhäusler's This Very Moment: The Berlin School and the Politics of Spatial Aesthetics in the German-Polish Borderlands," in Brad Prager and Jaimey Fisher, eds.: The Collapse of the Conventional: The German Film and its Politics at the Turn of the New Century [Publication expected 2008 with Wayne State UP]. "Peter Altenbergs literarischer Impressionismus," in Kristin Kopp and Werner Michael Schwarz, eds.: Peter Altenberg: Ashantee. Afrika und Wien um 1900 (Vienna: Löcker Verlag, 2008), pp. 141-149. "Reconfiguring the Border of Fortress Europe in Hans-Christian Schmid's Lichter," Germanic Review 82.1 (Winter 2007), pp. 31-53. "Ein Traumland Ost im deutschen Heimatfilm der 1950er Jahre? Kurt Hoffmanns Ich denke oft an Piroschka," in Gregor Thum, ed. Traumland Osten. Deutsche Bilder vom östlichen Europa im 20. Jahrhundert (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2006), pp. 138-156. "Cartographic Claims: Colonial Mappings of Poland in German Territorial Revisionism," in Gail Finney, ed. The Text as Spectacle: Visual Culture in Twentieth-Century Germany (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2006), pp. 199-213. |
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