German and Russian Studies @ the

University of Missouri
451 Strickland Hall | Columbia, MO 65211-4170
email: grs@missouri.edu | phone: 573-882-4328 | fax: 573-884-8456

Faculty | Prager

Brad Prager

Brad Prager with valley below

Associate Professor of German
Member of the Program in Film Studies
Affiliated Faculty for Art History and Archaeology
Education: Ph.D., 1999, Cornell University
Office: 453 Strickland Hall
Phone: 573-882-4328
Email: pragerb@missouri.edu
cv available on request

Research

Brad Prager is Associate Professor of German and an active member of the Program in Film Studies. His areas of research include Film History and Contemporary German Cinema, Holocaust Studies, and the art and literature of German Romanticism. He is the author of The Cinema of Werner Herzog: Aesthetic Ecstasy and Truth (London: Wallflower, 2007) and Aesthetic Vision and German Romanticism: Writing Images (Rochester: Camden House 2007). He is the co-editor of a new volume on Visual Studies and the Holocaust entitled Visualizing the Holocaust: Documents, Aesthetics, Memory (Camden House, 2008), of a volume on contemporary German cinema entitled The Collapse of the Conventional: German Cinema and its Politics at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century (Wayne State UP, 2010), the editor of A Companion to Werner Herzog (Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), and, together with Roger F. Cook, Lutz Koepnick, and Kristin Kopp, of Berlin School Glossary: An ABC of the New Wave in German Cinema (Intellect, 2013).

Professor Prager has been a DAAD Guest Professor at the University of Paderborn, where he organized the conference “The Holocaust on Screen in the 21st Century.” He has been a guest at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, is the University of Missouri System Representative to the state’s Holocaust Education and Awareness Commission, and was co-organizer of the 2012 documentary film conference “Based on a True Story” at MU.

Teaching

Professor Prager has taught a range of courses including:

German 2310/2320: German Civilization
(password required)
Recent German Cinema
History of German Film
After the Fact: The Holocaust in Contemporary History, Art and Literature
The Holocaust on Screen
Germany as Victim?
Marx and Nietzsche
German Classics: 1770-1830
The Romantic Sublime

also available from Amazon

also available from Amazon
(Read the H-Net Review)
Also reviewed in
Shofar and in the Journal of Genocide Research.

also available from Amazon
(Read the H-Net review)
Also reviewed in
The Germanic Review and in the Goethe Yearbook.

also available from Amazon
(read the Vertigo review)
Also reviewed in The Germanic Review, Zeitschrift für Germanistik and by El Pais

also available from Amazon
(Read the Monatshefte review)
Also reviewed in
Filmblatt and the Canadian Journal of Film Studies

Film Essays for Electric Sheep Magazine:

Matthias Glasner’s The Free Will (2006)

Oliver Hirschbiegel’s Invasion (2007)

Werner Herzog’s Encounters at the End of the World (2007)

Michael Haneke’s Funny Games (2007)

Publications

Books

Berlin School Glossary: An ABC of the New Wave in German Cinema, eds. Roger F. Cook, Lutz Koepnick, Kristin Kopp and Brad Prager (Bristol: Intellect, 2013)

A Companion to Werner Herzog, ed. Brad Prager (Boston and London: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012)

The Collapse of the Conventional: German Film and Its Politics at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century, eds. Jaimey Fisher and Brad Prager (Detroit: Wayne State, 2010)

Visualizing the Holocaust: Documents, Aesthetics, Memory, eds. David Bathrick, Brad Prager, and Michael D. Richardson (Rochester: Camden House, 2008)

The Cinema of Werner Herzog: Aesthetic Ecstasy and Truth (London: Wallflower, 2007).

Aesthetic Vision and German Romanticism: Writing Images (Rochester: Camden House, 2007).

Selected Articles

The Trail Runs Cold: DEFA's Crime Films in DEFA at the Crossroads of East German and International Film Culture: A Companion, eds. Marc Silberman and Henning Wrage (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2013) forthcoming.

Nazi, Interrupted: Cutting into the Past in Malte Ludin's Documentary "2 oder 3 Dinge, die ich von ihm weiß" in Colloquia Germanica(2013) forthcoming.

Leben heißt Posieren: Bilder aus dem Warschauer Ghetto - mit Susan Sontag betrachtet in Fotogeschichte 126 (2012) 37-48.

Gegenspieler und innere Dämonen - Dominik Grafs "Im Angesicht des Verbrechens" in Im Angesicht des Fernsehens: Der Filmemacher Dominik Graf, eds. Chris Wahl, Marco Abel, Jesko Jockenhövel and Michael Wedel (text + kritik, 2012) 215-237.

Offending the Public: Handke, Herzog, Hypnosis in Telos 159 (2012) 93-104.

Only the Wounded Honor Fights'" Züli Aladag's "Rage" and the Drama of the Turkish German Perpetrator in Turkish German Cinema in the New Millennium: Sites, Sounds, and Screens, eds. Sabine Hake and Barbara Mennel (Berghahn Books, 2012) 109-120.

Werner Herzog's Companions: The Consolation of Images in A Companion to Werner Herzog, (Boston and London: Wiley-Blackwell Publishing, 2012) 1-31.

Occupation as the Face of War: Concealing Violence in the Diary "A Woman in Berlin" in Fighting Words and Images: Representing War Across the Disciplines, eds. Elena Baraban, Stephan Jaeger, and Adam Muller (University of Toronto Press, 2012) 65-83.

Through the Looking Glass: Fassbinder's "World on a Wire" in A Companion to Rainer Werner Fassbinder, ed. Brigitte Peucker, (Boston and London: Wiley-Blackwell Publishing, 2012) 245-66.

Music After Mauthausen: Re-Presenting the Holocaust in Stefan Ruzowitzky's "The Counterfeiters" in New Directions in German Cinema, eds. Paul Cooke and Christopher Homewood (I.B. Tauris, 2011) 77-93.

Mit den Augen des Tieres: Werner Herzogs Primaten in Lektionen in Herzog: Neues über Deutschlands verlorenen Filmautor und sein Werk, ed. Chris Wahl (text + kritik, 2011) 210-33.

On Blank’s screen: Les Blank’s Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe and the gravity of the director’s subject, in Studies in Documentary Film 4.2 (2010) 119-36.

Play it Again, Traude: The Transgenerational Transfer of Wounds in Chris Kraus’s Vier Minuten in Generational Shifts in Contemporary German Culture, eds. Laurel Cohen-Pfister and Susanne Vees-Gulani (Camden House, 2010) 115-35.

Convergence Insufficiency: On Seeing Passages between W.G. Sebald and the ‘Travel Writer’ Bruce Chatwin in The Undiscover’d Country: W.G. Sebald and the Poetics of Travel, ed. Markus Zisselsberger (Camden House, 2010) 189-212.

Suffering and Sympathy in Volker Schlöndorff’s Der neunte Tag and Dennis Gansel’s NaPolA, in Screening War: Perspectives on German Suffering, eds. Paul Cooke and Marc Silberman (Camden House, 2010) 187-206.

Glimpses of Freedom: The Reemergence of Utopian Longing in German Cinema in The Collapse of the Conventional: German Film and its Politics at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century, eds. Jaimey Fisher and Brad Prager (Wayne State UP, 2010) 360-85.

Passing Time since the Wende: Recent German Film on Unification, German Politics and Society 28.1 (2010) 95-110.

The Holocaust without Ink: Absent Memory and Atrocity in Joe Kubert’s Graphic Novel Yossel: April 19, 1943 in The Jewish Graphic Novel: Critical Approaches, eds. Samantha Baskind and Ranen Omer-Sherman (New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 2008) 111-28.

The Stones Begin to Speak: The Laboring Subject in Early DEFA Documentaries in German Postwar Films. Life and Love in the Ruins, eds. William Rasch and Wilfred Wilms (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008) 77-91.

Interpreting the Visible Traces of Theresienstadt, Journal of Modern Jewish Studies (2008) 175-194.

On the Liberation of Perpetrator Photographs in Holocaust Narratives in Visualizing the Holocaust: Documents, Aesthetics, Memory, eds. David Bathrick, Brad Prager, and Michael D. Richardson (Rochester: Camden House, 2008) 19-37.

The Haunted Screen (Again): The Historical Unconscious of Contemporary German Thrillers in Victims and Perpetrators: 1933-1945 and Beyond. (Re)Presenting the Past in Post-Unification Culture, eds. Laurel Cohen-Pfister and Dagmar Wienroder-Skinner (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2006) 296-315 [pdf].

Air War and Allegory in Bombs Away!: Representing the Air War over Europe and Japan, eds. William Rasch and Wilfred Wilms (Amsterdamer Beiträge zur neueren Germanistik, 2006) 25-43.

Sebald's Kafka in W. G. Sebald: History - Memory - Trauma, eds. Scott Denham and Mark R. McCulloh (Berlin, New York: de Gruyter, 2006) 103-23.

The Good German: W.G. Sebald and the Risks of Holocaust Writing, New German Critique 96 (2005) 75-102.

A Collection of Damages: Critiquing the Violence of the Air War, Forum on Modern Language Studies 41.3 (2005) 308-19. [pdf]

The Erection of the Berlin Wall: Thomas Brussig's Heroes Like Us and the end of East Germany, Modern Language Review 99.4 (2004) 983-98.

The Face of the Bandit: Racism and the Slave Trade in Herzog's Cobra Verde, Film Criticism 28.3 (2004) 2-20.

Werner Herzog’s Hearts of Darkness: Fitzcarraldo, Scream of Stone and Beyond, Quarterly Review of Film and Video 20.1 (2003) 23-36.

Beleaguered under the Sea: Wolfgang Petersen’s Das Boot as a German Hollywood Film in Light Motives: German Popular Film in Perspective, ed. Randall Halle and Maggie McCarthy (Detroit: Wayne State UP, 2003) 237-258.

Modernism in the Contemporary Graphic Novel: Chris Ware and the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, International Journal of Comic Art 5.1 (2003) 195-213 [pdf].

Kant in Caspar David Friedrich’s Frames, Art History 25.1 (2002) 68-86. [abstract ]

Taming Impulses: Murnau’s Sunrise and the Exorcism of Expressionism, Literature/ Film Quarterly 28.4 (2000) 284-292.

The Contours of the Visual Arts in Tieck’s Franz Sternbalds Wanderungen: Text/ Image/ Phantasm, Seminar: A Journal of Germanic Studies 35.3 (1999) 189-206.

The Death Metaphysics of Heiner Müller’s "The Task," New German Critique 73 (Winter 1998) 67-80.