Julia Hell's research and teaching interests focus on nineteenth- and twentieth- century German culture; literature, the visual arts, and politics; history and theory of realism/modernism; and the history, theory, and aesthetics of empires and their ruins. She is currently co-editor of Germanic Review..

Julia Hell has organized a series of international conferences:

• on the author and painter Peter Weiss (at Duke University with Sara Danius)
• The Unification Effect: 1989-1999 (at Michigan with Johannes von Moltke)
• and Ruins of Modernity (at Michigan with Andreas Schoenle)

The latter was part of a larger project including panels at the German Studies Association, a mini-symposium at the German Department on W. G. Sebald (Andreas Huyssen, Columbia) and post-Soviet landscapes (Thomas Lahusen, Toronto), an interdisciplinary seminar co-taught with Andreas Schoenle (Slavic Studies) in the fall of 2004, a series of lectures at the Institute of the Humanities and a graduate student workshop preceding the conference. The project explored the connection between modernity and ruins/ruination addressing topics such as ruins as signifiers of modernity's break with traditions, the connection of ruins and empire, and ruins as part of post-industrial cities/landscapes. The conference was sponsored among others by the Institute for the Humanities, Architecture and Urban Planning, the DAAD, and the International Institute. The conference included the screening of a documentary, Detroit: Ruin of a City (2005), by Michael Chanan and George Steinmetz. For more information see www.detroitruinofacity.com. A collection of essays based on the Ruins of Modernity conference is forthcoming with Duke University Press. For more information click here. The volume contains a conceptual introduction by Hell and Schoenle on the politics and aesthetics of ruins.

Hell has published extensively on German culture in the wake of National Socialism. She received the MLA's Scaglione Prize for her Post-Fascist Fantasies (1997) and is currently working on a book-length manuscript provisionally entitled Ruins: From the Roman Empire to the Third Reich. The manuscript deals with the politics and aesthetics of imperial mimesis drawing on German, but also British and French materials from the Napoleonic era to post-World War II Europe.

• Writing Travel: The Poetics and Politics of the Modern Journey, edited by John Zilcosky, University of Toronto Press, 2008.
  
• Ruins of Modernity, editor with Andreas Schoenle, forthcoming Duke UP.
• Post-Fascist Fantasies: Psychoanalysis, History, and the Literature of East Germany, (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997). Selected parts of the text are available as pdf documents: Contents, Introduction, History as Trauma.
  
• "Remnants of Totalitarianism: Hannah Arendt, Heiner Mueller, Slavoj Zizek and the Re-Invention of Politics," Telos 136 (Fall 2006).
• "The Angel's Enigmatic Eyes, or The Gothic Beauty of Catastrophic History in W.G. Sebald's "Air War and Literature," CRITICISM, 46:3 (2004).
  
• "Eyes Wide Shut, or German Post-Holocaust Authorship," in New German Critique, n. 88 (Winter 2003).
  
• "Wendebilder: Neo Rauch and Wolfgang Hilbig", The Germanic Review, vol. 77, no. 4 (Fall 2002), special issue on Contemporary German Culture, ed. Amir Eshel.