Katra Byram works and teaches in the areas of narrative theory, ecocriticism, gender studies, and German literature and culture from the late 19^th century to the present. In all of these contexts, she asks how  historical and cultural context affect the stories people tell about themselves and the world around them.  

Her current book project, Remembering Mother: The Evolution of Memory in Postwar Germany, illuminates how genre links gender and memory by examining German-language memoirs and novels about World War II-era mothers and grandmothers. Tracing the evolution of family novels written between 1948 and 2018, it contends that analyzing genre provides a way to track the interlocking dynamics of gender and collective memory through time.  As it does, it upends the common generational account of postwar German memory culture. Contemporary family novels display features common in books about mothers from the 1950s forward, as well as in female-coded genres. The book thus contends that the change in public memory culture that took place in Germany around 2000 can be viewed as a gendered shift, rather than a generational one. In the last twenty years, what was once seen as women’s memory has become German memory.

Dr. Byram’s recent course offerings include “What is Human about Nature?”, “America Through German Eyes,” “Protest, Rebellion, and Revolution,” “Cultural Memory in Microcosm: Histories of Family and Self,” and “Narrative as Social Action.”

She is also a core member of Project Narrative, director of the Umwelt Center for German Studies and Environmental Humanities, and co-editor of the Ohio State University Press book series Theory and Interpretation of Narrative.

Publicly available research:

“Narrative as Social Action: Making Rhetorical Theory Accountable to Context.” Poetics Today 43.3 (2022): 455-478.

"The Case of the Disappearing Son: Gender, Genre, and German Postwar Cultural Memory." Contested Selves: Life Writing and German Culture. Eds. Herjes, Katja and Elisabeth Krimmer. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2021. 191-204.

"The Challenge of Mütterliteratur: Gender, Generation and the Genres of German Cultural Memory." German Studies Review 41.1 (2018): 41-59. 

"But We Are Living in a Material (and Virtual) World: How Tiny-House Blogs Are Reshaping the Bildungsroman." Narrative Culture 4.1 (2017): 15-31.

Ethics and the Dynamic Observer Narrator: Reckoning with Past and Present in German Literature. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2015.    

"Fairy Tales in a Modern(Ist) World: Gerhart Hauptmann's Bahnwärter Thiel and Marie Von Ebner-Eschenbach's Das Gemeindekind " German Quarterly 86.2 (2013): 141-59.