Department of German and Russian Studies
German and Russian Studies @ the MU logo University of Missouri
451 Strickland Hall (formerly GCB) | Columbia, MO 65211-4170
email: grs@missouri.edu | phone: 573-882-4328 | fax: 573-884-8456
Faculty | Engelstein

Stefani Engelstein

Stefani Engelstein
Professor Engelstein in front of the Medical History Museum, Berlin

Rocky Mountain National Park
Rocky Mountain National Park

Glacier National Park
Glacier National Park

Associate Professor of German
Co-Director of Undergraduate Studies in German
Editor: German Studies Calls-for-Papers List
Education: Ph.D. in Comparative Literature, University of Chicago, 2001
     B.A. in Literature, Yale University, 1992
Office: 428B Strickland Hall
Phone: 573-882-9450
Email: engelsteins@missouri.edu

Curriculum vita (Word)

Research

My research focuses on German and British literature and the life sciences in the Enlightenment and Romantic periods. I explore the significance of shifting representations of the body in literature and other disciplines for emerging theories of human subjectivity, gender, volition, ethical behavior, and political organization. I am interested in the development of biological justifications for ideologies of race, gender, and social hierarchies. These issues also inform my work on German-Jewish culture from the Enlightenment to the present.

At the moment I am working on a book called The Universal Family: Heredity, Sibling Incest, and Collective Identity, in which I investigate debates surrounding the mechanisms of reproduction and heredity in correlation with literary depictions of sibling incest.

I appeared as a guest on the Chicago Public Radio talk show Odyssey on a program about Medicine and the Body (scroll down to June 21, 2004).

I founded and edit the German Studies Calls-for-Papers List which provides a forum for Calls for Papers in all areas related to the field of German Studies as well as on interdisciplinary and comparative topics.

Teaching

Courses I teach include

Graduate Courses

The Enlightenment and Romanticism
German-Jewish Culture through Literature
Enlightenment and Romantic Aesthetics
Sibling Incest in German Literature

Undergraduate Courses

German-Jewish Culture through Literature
Disciplining Bodies: Literature and the Life Sciences
Monstrous Births: Nineteenth-Century Tales of Creation
German Civilization I and II
Eerie Tales
Introduction to German Literature (formerly Advanced German Reading)
Contemporary German Culture

Recent Publications

Books

Anxious Anatomy: The Conception of the Human Form in Literary and Naturalist Discourse. Forthcoming from SUNY Press. Series: Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century. 2008.

Violence, Aesthetics, Culture: Germany 1789-1938. Co-editor with Carl Niekerk. Preliminary contract with Rodopi Press. 2008.

Articles

The Open Wound of Beauty: Kafka Reading Kleist. The Germanic Review. 81.4. (Fall 2006): 340-359.

Sibling Incest and Cultural Voyeurism in Günderode's Udohla and Thomas Mann's Wälsungenblut. The German Quarterly. Forthcoming. 77.3 (July 2004)

Reproductive Machines in E.T.A. Hoffmann. Body Dialectics in the Age of Goethe. Ed. Holger Pausch and Marianne Henn. Rodopi Press. 2003. 169-193.

The Regenerative Geography of the Text in William Blake. Modern Language Studies. 30.2 (Fall 2000): 61-86.

Out on a Limb: Military Medicine, Heinrich von Kleist and the Disarticulated Body. German Studies Review. 23.2 (May 2000): 225-244.
[Winner of the 2001 Article Prize for an Outstanding Article, awarded by the DAAD amd the German Studies Association.]