As part of Prof. von Hammerstein’s promotion to Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor, she will present her research in the Provost’s distinguished speaker series, an exceptional set of talks by the most outstanding faculty of the university.

Her presentation takes place April 24th, 2021 at 4pm, and she will speak on “Voices of Genocide: From German Colonialism in Africa to the Southern District Federal Court of New York.”

The webex link is available here: https://uconn-cmr.webex.com/webappng/sites/uconn-cmr/meeting/download/a86dddd0d760475abb2fbc71c953b8cf?siteurl=uconn-cmr&MTID=m01a761548b79b9db5d9cc1358d151aa4

Bio:

Katharina von Hammerstein received her Ph.D. in German Literature at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and holds a degree in Mathematics, German, and Education from the University of Goettingen, Germany.

Her area of scholarly expertise is German-language literature and culture of the late eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Her publications focus on German Romanticism (including extensive work on Sophie Mereau-Brentano); autobiographical writings as political practice in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century public discourses; the ways women have inscribed themselves into literary, social and political discourses in the nineteenth century; representations of female happiness from the Enlightenment to the turn of the century; colonial constructions of Self and Other as represented in the ways Black men and women have been represented in German-language literature, ethnology and visual arts around 1900; and human rights and humanitarianism in German-language literature. She has also published in the area of interdisciplinary curriculum development, i.e., on approaches to linking language learning to the learning in other disciplines, such as history, art history, political science, geography, film, etc.

Her scholarly background comes to bear in her graduate courses on German Romanticism; Self-Writings and Writing Yourself; Colonial and Postcolonial German-African Connections; Gender and Literature; Love in Literature; the 1848 Revolution; and various other topics of eighteenth through twentieth-century literature and culture. Since von Hammerstein is also very interested in film, she includes film and other artistic representations (e.g., UConn’s extensive and precious Käthe Kollwitz collection) whenever appropriate. Her research projects have regularly taken her to Germany, Austria, Poland, and Namibia. She has presented papers at national and international conferences ranging from all over the U.S., Canada and Germany to Russia, England, Spain, Italy, France, South Africa, and Namibia.