Anna Parkinson is Associate Professor in the German Department and member of the Critical Theory Cluster. Her first book
An Emotional State: The Politics of Emotion in Postwar West German Culture (University of Michigan Press, 2015) explores theories of affect and emotion in the postwar German context, illuminating the interpretive limitations of the normative claim that after 1945 the German people evinced “an inability to mourn.” Examining the moral impulse of the unfolding normalization of affect in the immediate postwar period the book examines how intellectuals and writers reworked concepts of emotion as they reflected on the “state” of postwar West Germany. In 2008 her dissertation won the Women-in-German best dissertation Prize. Her scholarship has been supported by grants from institutions including the DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service), the Mellon Foundation, the "Languages of Emotion" Excellence Cluster at the Freie Universität Berlin, the Einaudi Center and the Deutsches Literaturarchiv (German Literature Archive) in Marbach, Germany. Recently she held the Leon Milman Memorial Fellowship at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum allowing her to work on her new book project on German-Jewish survivor, author, and child psychoanalyst Hans Keilson.
Recent publications include: “Adorno on the Airwaves: Feeling Reason, Educating Emotions,” in
German Politics and Society (2014) and “The Death of the Adversary: Enduring Ambivalence in Hans Keilson’s Postwar Psychoanalytic Literature,” in Simone Schröder, Ulrike Weymann, and Andreas Martin Widmann, “
Die vergangene Zeit bleibt die erlittene Zeit.”
Untersuchungen zum Werk von Hans Keilson (Königshauses und Neumann, 2013).
Her teaching and research interests include: twentieth and twenty-first century German literature and film, psychoanalytic and critical theory, gender and queer theory, affect theory and the history of emotions, literary theory, translation theory, genocide studies, urban studies, and transnational trauma studies.
Courses Taught
