Verena Kick | Department of German | Georgetown University

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 conducted archival research for her book at the German Literature Archive (DLA) in Marbach, Germany (supported by the Kurt Tucholsky Foundation), as well as at the Library of Congress, the USHMM Shapell Center, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.

SCHOLARSHIP:

Her scholarship encompasses 20th century German modernism and visual culture, photobooks, materiality, design, film, and Digital Humanities.
Her current book project, Photobook Politics, examines how German photobooks from 1915 to 1945 utilized material and design elements to convey political ideologies. Elements such as covers, formats, typefaces, and captions operate independently and together, contributing to what she terms a “functional montage.” Viewing the photobook as a functional montage reveals how Weimar and Nazi era photobooks created political agendas through seemingly minor material and typographical elements that shape the presentation of the books’ texts and photographs.
She has published articles on the digital curation of photobooks, photomontage and "functional montage" in Kurt Tucholsky and John Heartfield's Deutschland, Deutschland über Alles (1929), Annemarie Schwarzenbach's intersectional photography in the US South, Franz Kafka's drawings and their materiality, Thomas Heise's use of the "archive effect" in Heimat ist ein Raum aus Zeit (2019) and Werner Herzog's concept of history in Lektionen in Finsternis (1992). 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. November 2024: Under Contract with IOPN (Illinois Open Publishing Network)
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 "Babylon, Berlin, Bauhaus," "Women on Screen: A Century of Women in German Cinema," "Schwarz und Deutsch sein / Black Germany," "Coordinates of Modernism: From Crises and War to Montage and Metropolis, or "Picturing History: Intermediality and German History in the 20th and 21st Centuries"

(credit for profile photo: KWI, eventfotograf.in“)

Academic Appointment(s)