About
Kerstin Barndt studied German literature, philosophy, and linguistics. Her research and teaching focuses on the literary and visual cultures of the long twentieth century with a current emphasis on museum history and exhibition culture.
Sentiment and Sobriety. The New Woman Novel in the Weimar Republic, Barndt's first book, explores the intersections between gender, literary form, and an emerging "middle sphere" within Germany's literary public after WWI. The project's particular emphasis on gender theory and women's history has also opened doors to the museum world. At Dresden's Hygiene Museum (Museum of Hygiene), Barndt curated exhibits on the history of abortion, and the birth control pill.
Her current book manuscript, Non/Synchronicities. Exhibiting Time and History in Contemporary Germany undertakes a journey through Germany's post-unification landscape with its ever-expanding number of museums, memorial sites, and exhibitions. The cutting edge exhibition sites selected for this study work through the tensions between national representation and regional revival, globalization, deindustrialization, and migration. Barndt analyzes these projects with an eye on their specific representations of time and history. Drawing on her curatorial experience from working with the Museum of Hygiene, Kerstin collaborated in 2010 with artist Sarah Berkeley and exhibited a multi-media installation, Hello. My Name is Tam, in the old public museum in Grand Rapids. http://www.sarahberkeley.com/categories/multi-media-installations/projects/hello-my-name-is-tam
Selected Publications
Book Publications
- Weimar Publics/Weimar Subjects. Rethinking the Political Culture in Germany in the 1920s, co-editor with Kathleen Canning and Kristin McGuire, Oxford/New York: Berghahn 2010. Link to book page.
- Sentiment und Sachlichkeit. Der Roman der Neuen Frau in der Weimarer Republik, (Sentiment and Sobriety. The New Woman Novel in the Weimar Republic) Cologne/Vienna: Böhlau 2003. Link to book page.
Selected Articles
- "Working Through Ruins: Berlin’s Neues Museum," Germanic Review, forthcoming (November 2011).
- "'Dioramas of a New World:' Siegfried Kracauer and Weimar Exhibition Culture," Culture in the Anteroom. The Legacies of Siegfried Kracauer, ed. by Gerd Gemünden and Johannes von Moltke, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, forthcoming.
- "Layers of Time. Industrial Ruins and Exhibitionary Temporalities," PMLA 125.1 (January 2010), 134-141. View PDF
- "'Memory Traces of an Abandoned Set of Futures.' Industrial Ruins in the Post-Industrial Landscapes of East and West Germany," Ruins of Modernity, ed. by Julia Hell and Andreas Schönle, Durham: Duke University Press 2010, 270-293. View PDF
- "Aesthetics of Crisis. Motherhood, Abortion, and Melodrama in Irmgard Keun and Friedrich Wolf," Women in German Yearbook 24 (2008), 71-95. View PDF
- "Mothers, Citizens, and Consumers: Female Readers in Weimar Germany," Weimar Publics/ Weimar Subjects, ed. by Kathleen Canning, Kerstin Barndt, Kristin McGuire, Oxford/New York: Berghahn 2010, 95-115.
- "Fordist Nostalgia. History and Experience at The Henry Ford," Rethinking History, (Summer 2007), 379-410. View PDF
