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Professor of German,
Professor of History,
Professor of Women's Studies

• Affiliation(s)

  • Germanic, Women’s Studies, History, History of Art

• Fields of Study

  • Early Modern German Literature, Culture, and History
  • European Reformations
  • History of Sexuality, Gender History
  • Visual Culture

• About

  Helmut Puff's teaching and research focus on German literature, history, and culture in the late medieval and early modern period. He specializes in gender studies, the history of sexuality, media history, the history of reading, and the literature of the Reformation and the Renaissance. Recently, Helmut Puff has moved on to research modes of seeing and visual culture in early modern Europe with a focus on German Renaissance art, especially Albrecht Dürer. His interest in the intersections between textuality, visuality, and spatiality, has led him to research the changing representations of ruins as well as the history of three-dimensional city models from the sixteenth century to the present.

  From 2002 until 2005, Helmut Puff served as the North American co-editor of the journal Gender and History. Together with Nancy Hunt (History / IRWG) Helmut Puff directed a program entitled "Global Turns and Gender Returns"--an initiative to promote new transcultural intellectual alliances and conversations among gender scholars based in manifold locations throughout the world. Helmut Puff was elected to a five-year term on the MLA's Divisional Committee on German Literature prior to 1700. In 2011-12, he directs Academic Year in Freiburg, an exchange program of four mid-Western universities, one of them University of Michigan, with Albert-Ludwigs-Universität in Freiburg, Germany www.ayf.uni-freiburg.de.

  Selected Publications

  • "Wollust lernen," in Frühneuzeit-Info 20 (2010): 8-21
  • "The City as Model: Three-Dimensional Representations of Urban Space in Early Modern Europe," in Topographies of the Early Modern City, ed. Art Groos, Hans-Jochen Schiewer, and Markus Stock (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2008), pp. 193-217
  • "The Death of Orpheus (according to Albrecht Dürer)," in Dead Lovers: Erotic Bonds and the Study of Premodern Europe, ed. Basil Dufallo, Peggy McCracken (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006), pp. 71-95
  • "Early Modern Europe: 1400-1700," in Gay Life and Culture: A World History, ed. Robert Aldrich (London: Thames and Hudson, 2006), pp. 78-101 [with translations in Dutch, Finnish, French, German, and Swedish]
  • "Female Sodomy: The Trial of Katherina Hetzeldorfer (1477)," in The Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 30 (2000): 41-61
  • "Männergeschichten / Frauengeschichten: Über den Nutzen einer Geschichte der Homosexualitäten," in Geschlechtergeschichte und Allgemeine Geschichte: Herausforderungen und Perspektiven: Mit Beiträgen von Karin Hausen, Lynn Hunt, Thomas Kühne, Gianna Pomata und Helmut Puff, ed. Hans Medick, Anne-Charlotte Trepp (Göttingen: Wallstein, 1998), pp. 125-69

  Click here for a completed publication listing [PDF]

• Education

  • Ph.D., German and History, University of Basel

• Selected Publications:

• Books

  • (2003) Sodomy in Reformation Germany and Switzerland, 1400-1600
  • (1995) Von dem schlüssel aller Künsten / nemblich der Grammatica": Deutsch im lateinischen Grammatikunterricht

• Book Chapters

  • (2010) Memento Mori, Memento Mei: Albrecht Dürer and the Art of Dying, Enduring Loss in Early Modern Germany: Cross Disciplinary Perspectives
  • (2010) Ruins as Models, Displaying Destruction in Postwar Germany