Elisabeth Krimmer
Elisabeth Krimmer is Professor of German Studies at the University of California, Davis. Her interests include gender studies; life writing (memories and memoirs); the representation of war, violence, and trauma; film; and German literature and culture from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. Before coming to Davis, she was at Mount Holyoke College, Georgetown University, the University of Missouri, and Amherst College.
Professor Krimmer has authored and edited sixteen books and dozens of articles. She was awarded a Humboldt Fellowship in 2007 and a National Endowment of the Humanities Fellowship in 2014. In 2008, she was selected as one of four Chancellor’s Fellows campus-wide for a five-year term. In 2020, she received a Graduate Program Mentoring and Advising Award. Her article on castrati in German literature and culture around 1800 was awarded the essay prize of the Goethe Society of North America, and her article on warfare and gender in Kleist’s Hermannsschlacht and Penthesilea received the Max Kade essay prize for best article in The German Quarterly. She also received a CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title award for Contemporary Hollywood Masculinities.
Books
Professor Krimmer’s first book, In the Company of Men: Cross-Dressed Women around 1800 (Wayne State Univ. Press, 2004) analyzes constructions of gender, body and identity in German literature and culture around 1800. Her second book, The Representation of War in German Literature from 1800 to the Present (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2010) investigates the aesthetic, theoretical, and historical challenges that confront writers of war. Her third book, German Life Writing and the Holocaust: Gender and Complicity in the Second World War (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2018) examines women’s life writing—memoirs, diaries, docunovels, and autobiographically inspired fiction—in order to shed light on female complicity in the Second World War and the Holocaust.
In addition to her work on German culture, Krimmer has also co-authored two books on Hollywood film entitled Hollywood Divas, Indie Queens and TV Heroines: Contemporary Screen Images of Women (Rowman & Littlefield, 2004) and Hollywood Masculinities: Gender, Genre, and Politics (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).
Edited Books and Articles
Professor Krimmer’s co-edited volumes cover a wide range of topics, including the representation of warfare; the nexus of religion, reason, and culture in eighteenth-century Germany; women’s literature of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-centuries; issues of performativity and embodiment; and discourses and representations of female leadership in German literature and culture.
Professor Krimmer’s articles have appeared in venues such as PMLA, The German Quarterly, Seminar, German Life and Letters and Eighteenth-Century Studies. She was co-editor of The Goethe Yearbook from 2014 to 2019.
Courses
Professor Krimmer teaches a wide range of courses including large interdisciplinary lecture courses on the history of the witch persecutions and on fairy tales, undergraduate seminars on German Women and Film, German Drama, and Business German, and graduate courses on memory and memoir, feminist film theory, the novel of Bildung, Kleist, Goethe and Romanticism. She has also taught a course on “Body Theory” in Women’s Studies and Critical Theory. She served as Chair of German & Russian from 2011-2015.