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Hester Baer

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Professor, School of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures
Germanic Studies, German Studies
Affiliate Professor, The Harriet Tubman Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
Affiliate Professor, Cinema and Media Studies

3207 Jiménez Hall
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Research Expertise

Film studies
German Studies
Women's Literature and Feminist Theory

Dr. Hester Baer joined the faculty of the University of Maryland in Fall 2013. She served as the Department Head of German Studies from 2015-2019. She is also a core faculty member in Cinema and Media Studies and Comparative Literature, and an affiliate faculty member in the Harriet Tubman Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies.

Professor Baer currently serves as co-editor of the German Quarterly, the flagship journal in the field. She previously served a three-year term as co-editor of the journal Feminist German Studies (2019-21). Baer's research interests focus on gender and sexuality in film and media; historical and contemporary feminisms; environmental humanities; and German literature and culture in the 21st Century. Her books include Dismantling the Dream Factory: Gender, German Cinema, and the Postwar Quest for a New Film Language (Berghahn, 2009); German Cinema in the Age of Neoliberalism (Amsterdam UP, 2021), and a monograph about postwar Germany's first feminist film, Ula Stöckl's The Cat Has Nine Lives (1968) for the series "German Film Classics" (Camden House, 2022). With Jill Suzanne Smith, Baer is the co-editor of the new volume Babylon Berlin, German Visual Spectacle, and Global Media Culture (Bloomsbury, 2024). She is currently undertaking research, funded by an Insight Development Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (2022-24), for a new monograph, co-authored with Angelica Fenner, Feminist Film History Reframed: The Ulm Film School, 1962-68.

Baer's publications on feminisms in the German context include "Women's Film Authorship in Neoliberal Times: Revisiting Feminism and German Cinema" (2018), a special issue of Camera Obscura co-edited with Angelica Fenner; "Redoing Feminism: Digital Activism, Body Politics, and Neoliberalism" (Feminist Media Studies, 2015); and "Digital Feminisms and the Impasse: Time, Disappearance, and Delay in Neoliberalism," co-authored with Carrie Smith-Prei and Maria Stehle (Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature, 2016). Baer has also served as the guest editor of a special issue of Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature (2011), entitled "Contemporary Women's Writing and the Return of Feminism in Germany"; and a co-editor, with Alexandra Merley Stewart, of German Women's Writing in the Twenty-First Century (Camden House, 2015). Baer is the translator and co-editor, with Elizabeth Baer, of The Blessed Abyss: Inmate #6582 in Ravensbrück Concentration Camp for Women by Nanda Herbermann (Wayne State UP, 2000), originally published in Germany in 1946. 

Together with Professor Michele M. Mason (Japanese, UMD), Baer is the co-organizer of a collaborative research and teaching project that interrogates the concept of futurity in the context of environmental activism and artistic engagement with atomic issues from 1945 to the present. Baer and Mason are co-editors of a volume, Nuclear Futures in the Post-Fukushima Age: Literature, Film, and Performance from Germany and Japan, forthcoming in the series Literatures, Cultures, and the Environment (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024).

Professor Baer received her Ph.D. in German from Washington University in St. Louis, where she also earned a graduate certificate in Women's Studies. Her education included a fellowship from the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) to conduct research in Berlin and exchange years in Tübingen and Vienna. After completing her degree, she spent a year at Duke University as the Lisa Lee and Marc Ewing Postdoctoral Fellow in German Studies and Women's Studies. Before coming to Maryland, Professor Baer taught German and Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Oklahoma, where she was named Associates Second Century Presidential Professor. Baer has served as the President of the South Central Modern Language Association and as the President of the Coalition of Women in German. The recipient of a Fulbright award for travel to Germany in 2004, she spent summer 2012 in Berlin on a DAAD Research Visit Grant. In 2014-15, she held the Clara and Robert Vambery Distinguished Professorship of Comparative Studies at UMD and was a fellow at the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities. She currently serves as the University of Maryland's inaugural Mellon Humanities Fellow for the Big Ten Academic Alliance's Academic Leadership Program (2023-25).

At the University of Maryland, Baer teaches a wide range of courses in German language, literature, and culture, film studies, and theory. Her recent undergraduate courses include "Thinking, Feeling, and Sensing: Film Theory and the Experience of Cinema," "Feminist Film and Media Theory," "Berlin - Capital of the 20th Century," and "Nazis, Terrorists, and Spies: Coming to Terms with the Past and Present in Recent German Film." Her graduate seminars include "German Literature in the 21st Century," "Weimar Culture," “All Power to the Imagination!: 1968 and German Culture,” and "Future Tense: Speculative Visions in German Culture."
 

Publications

Babylon Berlin, German Visual Spectacle, and Global Media Culture

The essays in this collection address the German television series Babylon Berlin and explore its unique contribution to contemporary visual culture.

School of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures | Cinema and Media Studies | German Studies

Author/Lead: Hester Baer
Non-ARHU Contributor(s):  Jill Suzanne Smith
Dates:

Since its inception in 2017 the series, a neo-noir thriller set in Berlin in the final years of the Weimar republic, has reached audiences throughout Europe, Asia, and the Americas and has been met with both critical and popular acclaim. As a visual work rife with historical and contemporary citations Babylon Berlin offers its audience a panoramic view of politics, crime, culture, gender, and sexual relations in the German capital.

Focusing especially on the intermedial and transhistorical dimensions of the series, across four parts-Babylon Berlin, Global Media and Fan Culture; The Look and Sound of Babylon Berlin; Representing Weimar History; and Weimar Intertexts-the volume brings together an interdisciplinary and international group of scholars to critically examine various facets of the show, including its aesthetic form and citation style, its representation of the history and politics of the late Weimar Republic, and its exemplary status as a blockbuster production of neoliberal media culture.

Considering the series from the perspective of a variety of disciplines, Babylon Berlin, German Visual Spectacle, and Global Media Culture is essential reading for students of film, TV, media studies, and visual culture on German Studies, History, and European Studies programmes.

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German Cinema in the Age of Neoliberalism

This books presents a new history of German film from 1980-2010, focusing on its origins in and responses to advanced capitalism.

School of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures | Cinema and Media Studies | German Studies

Author/Lead: Hester Baer

This book presents a new history of German film from 1980-2010, a period that witnessed rapid transformations, including intensified globalization, a restructured world economy, geopolitical realignment, and technological change, all of which have affected cinema in fundamental ways. Rethinking the conventional periodization of German film history, Baer posits 1980-rather than 1989-as a crucial turning point for German cinema's embrace of a new market orientation and move away from the state-sponsored film culture that characterized both DEFA and the New German Cinema. Reading films from East, West, and post-unification Germany together, Baer argues that contemporary German cinema is characterized most strongly by its origins in and responses to advanced capitalism. Informed by a feminist approach and in dialogue with prominent theories of contemporary film, the book places a special focus on how German films make visible the neoliberal recasting of gender and national identities around the new millennium.

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