Erin McGlothlin

Chair and Associate Professor of German and Jewish Studies

PhD, University of Virginia

research interests:

20th- and 21st-Century German Literature
Holocaust Studies (Literature, Film, and Theory)
Jewish Studies (Contemporary German-Jewish and Diasporic Jewish Literature)
Narrative Theory
Autobiography
Memory Studies
The Graphic Novel

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contact info:

Email: mcglothlin@wustl.edu
Phone: 314-935-4288
Fax: 314-935-7255
Office: Ridgley 326

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mailing address:

Washington University
CB 1104
One Brookings Drive
St. Louis, MO 63130-4899

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: Claud Lanzmann's Shoah and its Outtakes (with Brad Prager and Markus Zisselsberger), will appear 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. She is currently finishing a book titled Constructing the Mind of the Holocaust Perpetrator in Fictional and Documentary Discourse, which is under advance contract 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 to 2012, Professor McGlothlin was Director of Research, and, in 2013, Interim Director of the Washington University Center for the Humanities.

Fall 2019 Course

Literary Seminar: German Life Writing since 1968 (German 528)

This graduate seminar aims to introduce students to one of the most important trends in German literary culture of the last half century, namely the profusion of texts that can be grouped loosely under the designation "life writing." In our survey of this large body of literature, which encompasses such referential genres as autobiographical narrative, biography, the diary, the personal essay, testimony, and other modes of self-expressive or confessional writing, we will concentrate on two objectives. First, we will become conversant in the literary and theoretical discourse on life writing, examining contributions to autobiographical theory from structuralism, poststructuralism, postcolonial theory and gender theory and focusing in particular on issues of authority, referentiality, performativity, positionality, dialogism, genre conventionality, the autobiographical pact, and the shifting boundaries between the autobiographical and the fictional. Second, we will explore the range of German life writing of the last several decades, from the New Subjectivity of the 1970s to the "father literature" of the 1980s, to the boom in post-Holocaust and post-Wende memory texts of the 1990s, to the generational and feminist writing of the 2000s, and to the more recent referential explorations of the self within the context of an increasingly diverse Germany. Primary texts in German; discussion (and some theoretical texts) in English.

in the news:

3.4.19

Winter 2018-19 Newsletter

1.11.19

2018 Faculty Updates

11.2.18

Professor Erin McGlothlin featured in Center for the Humanities article previewing November 5 Holocaust Memorial Lecture

7.27.18

Professor Erlin, Professor Kita, and Professor McGlothlin featured in Ampersand article about first ever Summer Humanities Institute

Persistent Legacy: The Holocaust and German Studies

Edited By Erin McGlothlin

In studies of Holocaust representation and memory, scholars of literature and culture traditionally have focused on particular national contexts. At the same time, recent work has brought the Holocaust into the arena of the transnational, leading to a crossroads between localized and global understandings of Holocaust memory. Further complicating the issue are generational shifts that occur with the passage of time, and which render memory and representations of the Holocaust ever more mediated, commodified, and departicularized. Nowhere is the inquiry into Holocaust memory more fraught or potentially more productive than in German Studies, where scholars have struggled to address German guilt and responsibility while doing justice to the global impact of the Holocaust, and are increasingly facing the challenge of engaging with the broader, interdisciplinary, transnational field.

Persistent Legacy connects the present, critical scholarly moment with this long disciplinary tradition, probing the relationship between German Studies and Holocaust Studies today. Fifteen prominent scholars explore how German Studies engages with Holocaust memory and representation, pursuing critical questions concerning the borders between the two fields and how they are impacted by emerging scholarly methods, new areas of inquiry, and the changing place of Holocaust memory in contemporary Germany.

Boydell and Brewer

Second-Generation Holocaust Literature: Legacies of Survival and Perpetration

By Erin McGlothlin

Among historical events of the 20th century, the Holocaust is unrivaled as the subject of both scholarly and literary writing. Literary responses include not only thousands of autobiographical and fictional texts written by survivors, but also, more recently, works by writers who are not survivors but nevertheless feel compelled to write about the Holocaust. Writers from what is known as the second generation have produced texts that express their feeling of being powerfully marked by events of which they have had no direct experience. This book expands the commonly-used definition of second-generation literature, which refers to texts written from the perspective of the children of survivors, to include texts written from the point of view of the children of Nazi perpetrators. With its innovative focus on the literary legacy of both groups, it investigates how second-generation writers employ similar tropes of stigmatization to express their troubled relationships to their parents' histories. Through readings of nine American, German, and French literary texts, Erin McGlothlin demonstrates how an anxiety with signification is manifested in the very structure of second-generation literature, revealing the extent to which the literary texts themselves are marked by the continuing aftershocks of the Holocaust.

Boydell and Brewer

After the Digital Divide? German Aesthetic Theory in the Age of New Media

Edited By Erin McGlothlin

The term "new media" is a current buzzword among scholars and in the media industry, referring to the ever-multiplying digitized modes of film/image and sound production and distribution. Yet how new, in fact, are these new media, and how does their rise affect the role of older media? What new theories allow us to examine our culture of ubiquitous electronic screens and networked pleasures? Is a completely new set of perspectives, concepts, and paradigms required, or are older modes of discussion about the relationship between technology and art still adequate? This book reconsiders the seminal work of German media theorists such as Adorno, Benjamin, and Kracauer in order to explore today's rapidly changing mediascape, questioning the naive progressivism that informs much of today's discourse about media technologies. The contributions, by internationally-recognized critics from a variety of academic fields, encourage a view of the history of media as structured by difference, complexity, and multiplicity. Together, they offer intriguing ways of understanding the changed position of media in today's Germany and beyond.

Boydell and Brewer