MITH is pleased to announce that Hester Baer, Vambery Distinguished Professor of Comparative Studies for the 2014-15 academic year, has also been named a MITH Fellow for the same period. During her fellowship year, Hester will be working on her project, Digital Feminisms: Transnational Activism in German Protest Cultures.
Hester Baer is Associate Professor of German at the University of Maryland, where she also serves as a core faculty member in the Film Studies program. Baer’s research interests focus on gender and sexuality in film and media, historical and contemporary feminisms, and German literature and culture in the 21st Century. She is the author of Dismantling the Dream Factory: Gender, German Cinema, and the Postwar Quest for a New Film Language (2009); the guest editor of a special issue of the journal Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature entitled “Contemporary Women’s Writing and the Return of Feminism in Germany” (2011); and the co-editor with Alexandra Merley Hill of the volume German Women’s Writing in the 21st Century (forthcoming in 2014). She is currently working on a new monograph that rethinks the history of German cinema from 1980-2010, German Cinema in the Age of Neoliberalism. Since 2012, Baer has served as President of the Coalition of Women in German.
Digital Feminisms: Transnational Activism in German Protest Cultures examines the reconfigurations of feminist activism in the context of rapid technological change, analyzing how the increased use of digital media has altered, influenced, and shaped feminist politics in the twenty-first century. Addressing the role of digital media in the transnational flow of feminist ideas, politics, and protesters, the project focuses on Germany in order to examine the way transnational feminist activism intersects with the national configuration of feminist political work, and how feminist activism may in turn transform emergent digital cultures. Bringing together scholars from the US, Canada, Germany, and the UK, this transdisciplinary, collaborative project engages digital media not only as its scholarly focus but also as a key component of the project’s methodology. Combining digital humanities paradigms with a conventional academic publishing project, Digital Feminisms seeks to develop a new research model that reaches multiple constituencies, while also reflecting critically on the subject of transnational feminist activism and digital culture through its presentation formats.
MITH is very excited to have opportunities for conversation and exchange with Hester over the next school year. Please join us in congratulating Hester on her award!