Keywords: Literature Studies - Nuclearity - Theoretical Approaches to the Environmental Humanities
Affiliation: University of Utah
Katharina Gerstenberger, PhD 1993 at Cornell University, is professor of German in the Department of World Languages & Cultures at the University of Utah. She is the author of Truth to Tell: German Women’s Autobiographies and Turn-of-the-Century Culture (2000) and Writing the New Berlin: The German Capital in Post-Wall Literature (2008). She co-edited German Literature in a New Century: Trends, Traditions, Transformations, Transitions (2008); After the Berlin Wall: Germany and Beyond (2011); and Catastrophe and Catharsis: Perspectives on Disaster and Redemption in German Culture and Beyond (2015). Her articles on topics of 20th and 21st German literary culture and questions of Environmental Humanities have appeared in, among others, Ecozon@, Gegenwartsliteratur, Monatshefte, Women in German Yearbook, and German Studies Review, and in several anthologies, most recently German-Speaking Nature Writing from the Eighteenth Century to the Present: Controversies, Positions, Perspectives (2024). She currently serves as editor of German Studies Review.
Gerstenberger’s approach to the Environmental Humanities focuses on the depiction of environmental challenges mainly in literature but also in film and in the visual arts. She is particularly interested in shifting relationships between humans and the non-human world, the tensions between local and global concerns, and the use of aesthetic means for environmental communication. She is completing a monograph on artistic responses to nuclear disasters across historical and cultural contexts, tentatively titled “Disturbed Places and Troubled Times: The Nuclear Narratives of Bikini Atoll, Chernobyl, and Fukushima.” The book traces evolving linguistic and visual approaches to nuclear disaster ranging from finding words for what were perceived as boundary-transgressing events to developing imagery for human-caused alterations of the planet.
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