Claudia Benthien - Universität Hamburg

CLAUDIA BENTHIEN – short CV
Dr. Claudia Benthien has been a full professor (W3) at the Department of Germanic Literatures,
University of Hamburg since 2005. She is a widely published specialist in German literature and
culture from 1600 to the present whose work focuses on cultural theory, gender studies, intellectual
history, aesthetics as well as performance and intermedial studies. Her historical foci include the
German Baroque, literature around 1800, and contemporary arts and culture.
She studied Germanic, American and English literatures and art history at the University of
Hamburg and Washington University, St. Louis. During work on her dissertation she was the holder
of a scholarship from the Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes (German National Academic
Foundation). From 1998 to 2000 she held a postdoctoral fellowship within the research group
Körper-Inszenierungen [‘Mises en Scènes of the Body’] at the Freie Universität, Berlin, and from 2000
to 2005 was an assistant professor (‘Wissenschaftliche Assistentin’) at Humboldt-University, Berlin,
where she also competed both her ‘Dr. phil.’ (1998), as well as her ‘Habilitation’ (2004). At the
University of Hamburg she has taken on several administrative positions and academic services, for
example, the position of acting Dean in the Faculty of Humanities.
Among other grants, Dr. Benthien has held the DAAD Fellowship at Deutsches Haus, New
York University, a senior fellowship at the Internationales Forschungszentrum Kulturwissenschaften,
Vienna, the Nord LB/ Warburg-Wolfenbüttel-Fellowship of the Herzog August Library, Wolfenbüttel,
and the Warburg Institute, London, and a research fellowship at the Maison des sciences de
l’homme, Paris. She was a visiting scholar at Columbia University, New York, and has held visiting
professorships at the University of Washington, Seattle, the University of California, Berkeley, and
Emory University, Atlanta.
Her most recent book examines the intersection of notions of shame and guilt cultures
around 1800 with close readings of four tragedies by Schiller and Kleist (Tribunal der Blicke.
Kulturtheorien von Scham und Schuld und die Tragödie um 1800 [‘The Tribunal of the Gaze: Tragedy
around 1800 and Cultural Theories of Shame and Guilt’]; Böhlau publishers, 2011). She has also
published a monograph on the rhetoric and performativity of silence in the 17th century (Barockes
Schweigen. Rhetorik und Performativität des Sprachlosen im 17. Jahrhundert; Fink publishers, 2006)
and is the author of Skin: On the Cultural Border between Self and the World (Columbia UP, 2002),
for which she received the Tiburtius dissertation award 1999 from the Berlin Senate.
Dr. Benthien’s current research project Literarizität in der Medienkunst [‘The Literariness of
New Media Art’], funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Research Foundation;
2014-2017) analyzes the aesthetics of oral and scriptural language in emerging forms of artistic
expression. The project is based on the observation that literature, poetic elements and structures
play a significant role in many new media artworks. She investigates this new and complex
transdisciplinary field from the perspective of literary studies, together with two researchers.
Other present research interests concern contemporary oral performances of poetry as well
as the Early Modern period as a recursive field for postmodernity. She is head of the research project
‚Performing Poetry.‘ Mediale Übersetzungen und situationale Rahmungen zeitgenössischer Lyrik,
dealing with medial translations and situational framings of contemporary poetry, within the
collaborative research center Translating and Framing. Practices of Medial Transformations (20152017), and principal investigator of the interdisciplinary graduate school Vergegenwärtigungen
[‘Realizations’] that considers ‘Representations of the Shoah in Comparative Perspective’ (20152017). Both these collaborative projects are funded through the Landesforschungsinitiative
(Authority of Science and Research) Hamburg.
Claudia Benthien is co-editor of the book series Handbücher zur Kulturwissenschaftlichen
Philologie [‘Handbooks of Cultural Philology’] with De Gruyter publishers and co-edited the first
volume of the series, a Handbuch Literatur & Visuelle Kultur (2014).
Address:
Phone:
Email:
Homepage:
Universität Hamburg, Institut für Germanistik, Von-Melle-Park 6, 20146 Hamburg,
Germany
+49-40-42838-2738 / secretary: -4792
[email protected]
http://www.slm.uni-hamburg.de/ifg2/personal/Claudia_Benthien.html