Claudia Benthien – short CV
Dr. Claudia Benthien is full professor at the Department of Germanic Literatures at the University of Hamburg. 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, art history and media studies. Her historical foci are the German Baroque, literature around 1800 and contemporary culture.
She studied Germanic, American and English literatures and art history at the University of Hamburg and Washington University, St. Louis. She held a postdoctoral fellowship at the research group „Körper-Inszenierungen” (‘Body-Mises en scènes’) at the Freie Universität, Berlin, and was assistant professor (“Wissenschaftliche Assistentin”) at Humboldt-University, Berlin, where she also received her PhD (Dr. phil.) and her “Habilitation”. Her dissertation was awarded the Tiburtius-Preis (1st prize), granted by the senate of the city of Berlin. Among other grants Dr. Benthien received the DAAD Fellowship at Deutsches Haus, New York University (2014), a senior fellowship at the Internationales Forschungszentrum Kulturwissenschaften, Vienna (2006), a research fellowship at the Maison des sciences de l’homme, Paris (2003), and the Nord LB/Warburg-Wolfenbüttel-Fellowship of the Herzog August Library, Wolfenbüttel, and the Warburg Institute, London (2001). She was a visiting scholar at Columbia University, New York, and helt visiting professorships at The University of Washington, Seattle (2014), The University of California, Berkeley (2009), and Emory University, Atlanta (2004).
Her recent book examines the intersection of notions of shame and guilt cultures around 1800 with close readings of four tragedies of Friedrich Schiller and Heinrich von 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 rhetorics 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 University Press, 2002).
Dr. Benthien’s ercurrent research project Literarizität in der Medienkunst (‘The Literariness of New Media Art’), funded by the DFG (German Research Foundation) 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. It investigates this new, transdisciplinary field from the perspective of literary studies. Other present research interests are concerning contemporary oral performances of poetry (readings, slam poetry, and their remediations) as well as the Early Modern period as a recursive field for (Post-)Modernity. As co-editor of the new series Handbücher zur Kulturwissenschaftlichen Philologie (‘Handbooks of Cultural Philology’) with De Gruyter publishers she is presently preparing a handbook on literature and visual culture to appear in fall 2014 (ed. with Brigitte Weingart).