Prof. Barndt's research and teaching focuses on German cultural history and literary theory, with an emphasis on Weimar Germany and contemporary cultural practices and politics. Her work balances the analysis of aesthetic production with theoretical and historical inquiry. Her investigations of literature, images, landscapes, and museum displays are informed by theories of gender, genre, representation, and ideology.

• 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
• "Aesthetics of Crisis. Motherhood, Abortion, and Melodrama in Irmgard Keun and Friedrich Wolf," Women in German Yearbook (forthcoming in Vol. 24/2008).
• "'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 (forthcoming, October 2008)
• "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 (forthcoming, 2008)
• "Geteilte Geschichte(n). Empathie und Verfremdung in aktuellen Migrationsausstellungen," Museum Aktuell (October 2007), 16-21.
• "Fordist Nostalgia. History and Experience at The Henry Ford," Rethinking History, (Summer 2007), 379-410.
• "'Eine von uns?' Irmgard Keuns Leserinnen und das Melodramatische," Autorinnen der Weimarer Republik, ed. by Walter Fähnders and Helga Karrenbrock, München: Aisthesis 2003, 137-162.