BIO:
- Verena Kick is an Assistant Professor of German at Georgetown University. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Washington, Seattle, in 2019. In the academic year 2022/23, she was a KWI International Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities (KWI) in Essen, Germany. She also undertook archival research for her book project at the German Literature Archive (DLA) in Marbach, Germany, supported by the Kurt Tucholsky Foundation.
SCHOLARSHIP:
- Her scholarship encompasses 20th century German modernism, photography, film, and Digital Humanities. Her research focuses on the intersection of non-fiction writing and visual culture, specifically on the combination of texts and photographs as an approach to examine the interwar public sphere in German-speaking countries.
- Her current book project, Photobook Politics, explores the mediation of social and political issues in photobooks published between 1918 and 1945. She examines what is represented in the works’ photographs and texts and focuses on the materiality and medium specificities of the photobooks and their elements. Photobook Politics shows how the materiality of photobooks shaped the public’s ideological views in Germany between 1918 and 1945. Using the publishing platform Scalar , she is also working on a digital addendum for her book.
- She has published articles on digital curation, Annemarie Schwarzenbach, Werner Herzog, Kurt Tucholsky, John Heartfield, and Franz Kafka. See the "Publications" section for further details.
DIGITAL HUMANITIES:
- She is currently working with Prof. Carsten Strathausen (University of Missouri) on the digital project Adapting Kafka . They use the publishing platform Scalar and the media repository Critical Commons to compile and analyze all editions, translations, and adaptations of Franz Kafka’s The Trial (1925). Their goal is to make these works more accessible to scholars and the general public and to offer scholarly analyses of these adaptations that take on a multimodal and creative form. Prof. Kick received support for this project from Georgetown's Digital Research Initiative.
- In November 2024, she organized the Digital Kafka Symposium that took place at Georgetown. In March 2022, she put together the first Digital Humanities-related symposium at Georgetown, supported by Georgetown's Humanities Initiative.
TEACHING:
- Besides teaching various levels of German language, Professor Kick offers courses on literature and film, including "All Eyes on Berlin", "Babylon, Berlin, Bauhaus," "Women on Screen: A Century of Women in German Cinema," or "Coordinates of Modernism: From Crises and War to Montage and Metropolis."
(credit for profile photo: KWI, eventfotograf.in“)