Faculty | Kopp
Kristin Kopp
 Dr. Kopp crossing the top of the Stilfser Joch
The Stilfser Joch in the Italian Alps |
Associate Professor of German and
Director of Graduate Studies in German
Faculty Affiliate with UMC Black Studies Program
Education: Ph.D. 2001, University of California, Berkeley
Office: 218A Strickland Hall
Phone: 882-3367
Email: koppkr@missouri.edu
Curriculum vita (Word)
Research
The 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 forthcoming book – Germany’s Wild East: Constructing Poland as Colonial Space (University of Michigan Press, forthcoming) – 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. Peter Altenberg: Ashantee. Afrika und Wien um 1900, which I co-edited with Werner Michael Schwarz, examines how the colonial relationship was staged in Europe, even in those countries such as Austria not directly engaged in overseas colonization.
Work in Progress
I am currently co-editing two volumes. The first of which, German-Polish Post/Memory: The Presence of the Past in Contemporary German and Polish Culture (Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming), which I’m co-editing with Joanna Ni?y?ska, investigates 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.
The second volume, which I am co-editing with my colleagues at the University of Missouri and Washington University is tentatively titled “Revolver Kino,” and will treat the new auteur cinema of Germany and Austria. The volume is forthcoming with Intellect.
I am also conceptualizing my next monograph under the working title “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.
Teaching
I mostly enjoy teaching courses that give students the opportunity to engage in critical intellectual discussions about literary and filmic representations and about the ways in which these 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.
In the spring semester of 2012, I will introduce two new courses. The first of these will be cross-listed with Black Studies, and will treat the cultural history of Blacks in Germany with a concentration on the diverse experiences of Blacks in Berlin today. I am developing this course together with history professor Jeff Bowersox of the University of Southern Mississippi, and the course will form the basis for a summer study abroad course in Berlin currently under construction. The second course will be cross-listed with film studies, and will introduce students to Weimar cinema – the silent films of Germany’s interwar period.
I typically teach
- German 8087: Graduate seminar on German colonial literature
- German 8005: Graduate seminar on German multiculturalism
- German 4160: "Contemporary German Cinema for fourth-year composition and conversation" (Fourth-year composition and conversation)
- German 3620: German Classics II: 20th-century German literature
- German 3620: "Eerie Tales" (19th-20th-century German literature)
- Honors/ German 3005: "Integrating Islam? Multiculturalism in Germany"
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Peter Altenberg:
Ashantee.
Afrika und Wien um 1900
Die Großstadt und das Primitive.
Text, Politik, Repräsentation
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Recent Publications
Please see my c.v. for the full listing.
Books
Kristin Kopp, Germany’s Wild East: Constructing Poland as Colonial Space (University of Michigan Press, forthcoming).
Kristin Kopp and Joanna Nizynska, eds., German-Polish Post/Memory: The Presence of the Past in Contemporary German and Polish Culture (Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming).
Roger Cook, Lutz Koepnick, Kristin Kopp, Brad Prager, Carsten Strathausen, eds., Revolver Kino (Intellect Books, forthcoming).
Kristin Kopp, and Werner Michael Schwarz. Peter Altenberg: 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.
Selected Articles
“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 (New York: Routledge, 2011), pp. 33-42.
“Arguing the Case for a Colonial Poland,” in Volker Langbehn and Mohammad Salama (eds.), German Colonialism: Race, the Holocaust, and Postwar Germany [Columbia University Press, forthcoming].
“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 (Detroit: Wayne State UP, 2010), pp. 285-308.
“Reinventing Poland as German Colonial Territory in the Nineteenth Century: Gustav Freytag's Soll und Haben as Colonial Novel,” in Robert L. Nelson (ed.), Germans, Poland, and Colonial Expansion to the East: 1850 Through the Present (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), pp. 11-37.
“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.), Visual Culture in Twentieth-Century Germany: The Text as Spectacle (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2006), pp. 199-213.
“’Ich stehe jetzt hier als einer von den Eroberern’: Soll und Haben als Kolonialroman,” in Florian Krobb (ed.), 150 Jahre 'Soll und Haben' (1855) Studien zu Gustav Freytags kontroversem Roman (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2005), pp. 225-237.
“Constructing Racial Difference in Colonial Poland,” in Eric Ames, Marcia Klotz, Lora Wildenthal (eds.), Germany’s Colonial Pasts (U of Nebraska P, 2005), pp. 76-96.
“Exterritorialized Heritage in Caroline Link’s Nirgendwo in Afrika,” New German Critique 87 (Fall 2002), pp. 106–132.
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University of Missouri