Karen Kenkel
Division Head of Humanities
B.A., Stanford University; Ph.D., Cornell University.
Biography
Dr. Kenkel was born into a large German Catholic family in the Midwest, and has lived in almost every major geographical area of the United States as well as in Berlin, Germany. She received her B.A. in German Studies (with a minor in Philosophy) from Stanford University and her Ph.D. in German Studies (minor in History) from Cornell University. She was an assistant professor in German Studies at Stanford University for several years, where she taught classes on topics ranging from 18th-century German philosophy to contemporary feminist media theory. Her dissertation, research, and publications have focused on gender in philosophy and culture, aesthetic theory and mass culture in Europe, and film (especially early film).
In her free time, Dr. Kenkel likes to tend her organic garden (including the compost worms), explore farmers’ markets, read, and adventure with her family.
Courses Taught
Critical Reading and Argumentation (OCRA1), AP United States History (OH011).Publications
Books
Öffentlichkeit - Geschichte eines kritischen Begriffs, with Russell Berman, Peter Hohendahl, and Arthur Strum (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2000)
Articles and Reviews
“Monstrous Women, Sublime Pleasure, and the Perils of Reception in Lessing’s Aesthetics,” PMLA, vol. 116, no. 3, May 2001, 545-561
“The Adult Children of Early Cinema,” Women in German Yearbook, vol. 15 (Lincoln and London: U of Nebraska P, 2000) 137-160
“Das Gesicht der Masse. Soziologische Visionen,” in Gesichter der Weimarer Republik. Eine Physiognomische Kulturgeschichte, eds. Sander L. Gilman and Claudia Schmölders (Cologne: DuMont, 2000) 206-227
“The Nationalization of the Mass Spectator in Early German Film,” in Celebrating 1895, The Centenary of Cinema (Sydney: Libbey, 1998) 155-163
“German Studies and the General Culture Course: the Stanford Curriculum,” with Russell Berman and John Heins, in A User’s Guide to German Cultural Studies, eds. Scott Denham, I. Kacandes, and J. Petropoulos (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1997)
“Die klassische Öffentlichkeit im Liberalismus 1815-1880,” in “Öffentlich/Publikum,” Russell Berman, Peter Hohendahl, Karen Kenkel, Art Strum, Historisches Wörterbuch Ästhetischer Grundbegriffe (Stuttgart: Metzler, forthcoming 2002)
"The Personal and the Philosophical in Fichte's Theory of Sexual Difference," in Impure Reason. Dialectic of Enlightenment in Germany, eds. W. Daniel Wilson and Robert C. Holub (Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1993) 278-297
“New Cultural Geographies: A Conference Report," New German Critique 46 (Winter 1989) 181-190
Review of Andrea Gogröf-Voorhees, Defining Modernism. Baudelaire and Nietzsche on Romanticism, Modernity, Decadence, and Wagner (New York: Peter Lang, 1999) in German Quarterly (forthcoming)
Review of Uli Jung and Walter Schatzberg, Beyond Caligari. The Films of Robert Wiene (New York, Oxford: Berghahn, 1999) in German Quarterly vol. 74.1, Winter 2001, 102-03
Review of Victoria J. Barnett, Bystanders. Conscience and Complicity During the Holocaust (Westport and London: Greenwood, 1999) in German Studies Review, vol. 24, no. 2, May 2001, 426-27
Review of Stanley Corngold, Complex Pleasure. Forms of Feeling in German Literature (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1998) in Colloquia Germanica, Fall 2000, 184-85
Review of Andrew Chandler, ed. The Moral Imperative. New Essays on the Ethics of Resistance in National Socialist Germany, 1933-1945 (Boulder and Oxford: Westview, 1998) in German Studies Review, May 2000, 371-72
Review of Wilma A. Iggers’ Women of Prague (Providence, Oxford: Berghahn 1995) in Modern Austrian Literature, vol. 30, Nr. 1, Spring 1997, 157-160
Translations
"Neoromantic Anticapitalism: Georg Lukács's Search for Authentic Culture," Peter U. Hohendahl, Reappraisals: Shifting Alignments in Postwar Critical Theory (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1991) 21-52