Professor McGlothlin's main research interests are in the areas of Holocaust literature and film and German-Jewish literature.
McGlothlin is the author of Second-Generation Holocaust Literature: Legacies of Survival and Perpetration (2006) and has co-edited two volumes: After the Digital Divide?: German Aesthetic Theory in the Age of New Digital Media (2009, with Lutz Koepnick) and Persistent Legacy: The Holocaust and German Studies (2016, with Jennifer Kapczynski). A third co-edited volume, The Construction of Testimony: Claude Lanzmann's Shoah and its Outtakes (with Brad Prager and Markus Zisselsberger), appeared in 2020. Additionally, she has published articles in major journals and edited volumes on Art Spiegelman’s Maus, Ruth Klüger’s weiter leben, Edgar Hilsenrath’s Der Nazi und der Friseur, Bernhard Schlink’s Der Vorleser, and other fictional and non-fictional works of Holocaust literature and film and German-Jewish literature. Her most recent book, The Mind of the Holocaust Perpetrator in Fiction and Nonfiction, will appear in early 2021 with Wayne State University Press.
In addition to a comparative focus on the literature of the Holocaust, McGlothlin’s research and teaching interests include postwar and contemporary German literature, Jewish Studies, narrative theory, autobiography, and the graphic novel. She has also created with Anika Walke a year-long first-year seminar on the Holocaust that culminates in a study trip to Holocaust-related sites in Germany, Poland, and Lithuania.
McGlothlin was a research fellow in residence at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies in 2006, was a co-leader with Anita Norich of the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies Hess Faculty Seminar on Holocaust Literature in January 2014, and was an instructor at the Summer Institute on the Holocaust and Jewish Civilization at Northwestern University in 2016 and 2018. She has received additional research grants from the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, the Fulbright Foundation, and the Washington University Center for the Humanities. In Summer 2010, she was a DAAD Guest Professor at the Universities of Dortmund and Paderborn. She is also co-editor (with Brad Prager) of the Camden House book series Dialogue and Disjunction: Studies in Jewish German Literature, Culture, and Thought, and is on the editorial board of German Studies Review and a member of the Academic Council of the Holocaust Educational Foundation at Northwestern University.
From 2010-2013 Professor McGlothlin was Director of Research and then Interim Director of the Washington University Center of the Humanities.