Caroline Kita

Caroline Kita

Associate Professor of German
Director of Graduate Studies, German and Comparative Literature
Performing Arts Department, Program in Film and Media Studies (Affiliate)
PhD, Duke University
research interests:
  • 19th- and 20th-Century German and Austrian Literature and Culture
  • German-Jewish Studies
  • Aesthetic Philosophy and Religion
  • Music and Narrative
  • The Radio Play (Hörspiel) in German Culture
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    • Department of Comparative Literature & Thought
    • MSC 1104-146-319
    • Washington University
    • 1 Brookings Drive
    • St. Louis, MO 63130-4899
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    Caroline Kita's research examines German and Austrian culture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, focusing on German-Jewish literature, music, theater, and radio drama

    Kita’s scholarship has examined religious and cultural identity in the works of Jewish writers and composers in fin-de-siècle Vienna, critiques of the total work of art, theories of listening and democracy, and sound, space, and time in German-language audiofiction. She is the author of Jewish Difference and the Arts in Vienna: Composing Compassion in Music and Biblical Theater (2019) and co-editor with Jennifer Kapczynski of The Arts of Democratization: Styling Political Sensibilities in Postwar Germany (2022). Her current book project, Border Territories: The Emancipatory Soundscapes of Postwar German Radio, traces the soundscapes of radio drama as spaces of cultural critique and political commentary in German culture in the aftermath of the Second World War. Her articles have appeared in The German Quarterly, The Journal of Austrian Studies, Monatshefte, and Unterrichtspraxis/Teaching German. In 2018, she co-edited a special issue of The German Quarterly on Music and German Culture.

    Kita teaches German language courses on all levels, as well as undergraduate and graduate seminars on music, drama, visual art, and literature in German and European cultures. She also teaches the seminar, “Introduction to Comparative Arts,” in the Comparative Literature & Thought.

    Kita earned her bachelor’s degree in History from Boston College and her doctorate from Duke University. She has studied at the University of Vienna, the University of Potsdam, and the University of Duisburg-Essen. She received a Fulbright Grant to Austria (2004-05), as well as funding for advanced research from the Austrian Exchange Service (Ernst Mach Grant, 2012; Franz Werfel Fellowship, 2015, 2017), and Washington University’s Center for the Humanities (Faculty Fellowship, 2018). Her current book project is being supported by a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities (2022).

    Recent Courses

    Selected Publications

    “Constructing Symphonic Worlds: Gustav Mahler, Weltliteratur, and the Musical Program.” German Literature as a Transnational Field of Production 1848-1919, edited by Lynne Tatlock and Kurt Beals, Camden House, 2023, pp. 228-2.

    "Musical Speech-Score as Soundscape: Elfriede Jelinek’s Die Schutzbefohlenen on the Radio.” Word, Sound, and Music in Radio Drama, edited by Jarmila Mildorf and Pim Verhulst, Brill, 2023, pp. 310-325.

    “Revisiting the Soundscapes of Postwar West German Radio Drama." A Companion to Sound Studies in German-Speaking Cultures, edited by Rolf Goebel, Camden House, 2023, pp. 151-164.

    in the news:

    Transnational literature in the age of nationalism

    Transnational literature in the age of nationalism

    Professor Kita and Professor Beals featured in Perspectives

    Professor Kita and Professor Beals featured in Perspectives

    Jewish Difference and the Arts in Vienna

    Jewish Difference and the Arts in Vienna

    By Caroline Kita

    During the mid-nineteenth century, the works of Arthur Schopenhauer and Richard Wagner sparked an impulse toward German cultural renewal and social change that drew on religious myth, metaphysics, and spiritualism. The only problem was that their works were deeply antisemitic and entangled with claims that Jews were incapable of creating compassionate art. By looking at the works of Jewish composers and writers who contributed to a lively and robust biblical theatre in fin-de-siècle Vienna, Caroline A. Kita, shows how they reimagined myths of the Old Testament to offer new aesthetic and ethical views of compassion. These Jewish artists, including Gustav Mahler, Siegfried Lipiner, Richard Beer-Hofmann, Stefan Zweig, and Arnold Schoenberg, reimagined biblical stories through the lens of the modern Jewish subject to plead for justice and compassion toward the Jewish community. By tracing responses to antisemitic discourses of compassion, Kita reflects on the explicitly and increasingly troubled political and social dynamics at the end of the Habsburg Empire.