Keywords: Anthropocene - Cultural Histories of Mountaineering - Mountain Cinema
Affiliation: Professor of German Studies at Emory University & Affiliated Faculty with the Tam Institute for Jewish Studies, Film Studies, Environmental Sciences, and the Sustainability Minor
Caroline Schaumann is Professor of German Studies at Emory University and affiliated faculty with the Tam Institute for Jewish Studies, Film Studies, Environmental Sciences, and the Sustainability Minor. She is the author of Memory Matters: Generational Responses to Germany's Nazi Past in Recent Women's Literature (Walter De Gruyter, 2008) that considers contemporary German literature and German-Jewish literature in the aftermath of the Holocaust. Schaumann’s current research focuses on ecocriticism and the environmental humanities, cultural histories of exploration and mountaineering, and the Anthropocene. Her second monograph, Peak Pursuits: The Emergence of Mountaineering in the Nineteenth Century (Yale University Press, 2020) sheds light on culturally constructed notions of wilderness, masculinity, and national identity.
Schaumann has co-edited four anthologies: The co-edited (with Sean Ireton) anthology Heights of Reflection: Mountains in the German Imagination from the Middle Ages to the Twenty-First Century (Camden House, 2012) examines the lure of mountains in German literature, philosophy, film, music, and culture from the Middle Ages to the present. German Ecocriticism in the Anthropocene (co-edited with Heather Sullivan, Palgrave, 2017) gathers essays on canonical and non-canonical German-language texts and films. Mountains and the German Mind: Translations from Gessner to Messner, 1541-2009 (co-edited with Sean Ireton, Camden House, 2020), offers the first scholarly English translations of thirteen vital texts elucidating the central role of mountains across five centuries of Germanophone cultural history. Global Mountain Cinema (co-edited with Christian Quendler and Kamaal Haque, Edinburgh University Press, 2025) is the first comprehensive study to approach mountain film culture from transgeneric, transnational, ecocritical, and intermedial perspectives.