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School of Modern Languages and Cultures

Dr Christine Achinger

 Christine AchingerAssociate Professor of German Studies

Tel: +44 (0)24 761 50388
Email: C dot E dot Achinger at warwick dot ac dot uk

FAB 4.53, Faculty of Arts Building
University of Warwick, Coventry CV4 7AL

On research leave during 2024-25

as Visiting Fellow at the Institut für Sozialforschung, Frankfurt

About

Christine Achinger studied Philosophy, Literature and Physics in Paris and Hamburg, where she was also involved in the non-commercial radio station FSK and in running the independent political library ‘Hamburger Studienbibliothek’, and worked at the concentration camp memorial site Hamburg-Neuengamme and in the ‘Institut für die Geschichte der deutschen Juden’. An MA in ‘Gender and Ethnic Studies’, investigating conceptions of the modern subject and the modern state as reflected in Enlightenment debates on Jewish and female emancipation, brought her to London. She moved on to write a PhD on the intersection of constructions of Jewishness, race, class, gender, and nation in 19th century Germany as reflected in Gustav Freytag’s novel Soll und Haben (1855) at the University of Nottingham and subsequently joined the Department of German Studies at Warwick in September 2006. During the academic year 2013-14, she held a Research Fellowship at the Frankel Institute for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor), and spent the winter terms 2009, 2012 and 2015 as a Visiting Scholar / Visiting Professor at the University of Chicago, where she currently also is an Associate Member of the History Department.

Research interests

My research interests are in the areas of

  • critical social theory and aesthetic theory
  • history and theories of antisemitism
  • constructions of gender, nation and race as part of capitalist modernity
  • Holocaust memory in Germany

My current research investigates constellations of images of femininity, Jewishness and race at important junctures in modern German and Austrian history between the Enlightenment and the Fin de Siècle. Such constructions of different kinds of alterity can serve as a key to understanding changing concerns regarding modernity, identity and the boundaries of the national community. The project aims to move beyond an exclusive focus on the parallels and intersections of ideas of Jewishness, femininity and race, e.g. in the figure of the ‘beautiful Jewess’ or the stereotypes of the 'oriental' or ‘effeminate Jew’. By also investigating the often quite different or even complementary discursive roles played by these notions of alterity and their interrelations, I hope to contribute to a more three-dimensional picture of the social developments to which they respond.

Teaching and supervision

Undergraduate:

Research Supervision:
  • Archives of Resistance - Black Feminist and Feminist of Colour Movements in Germany (PhD, in progress)
  • Exploring Weimar Cinema (1918-1933) Through The Lens Of The ‘Other’ (PhD, in progress)
  • Israelkritik und Antisemitismus in der Bundesrepublik (1949 bis 2005) [Critique of Israel and antisemitism in the Federal Republic of Germany (1949 to 2005)] (PhD, completed)
  • Sisters in Arms? Female Participation in Leftist Political Violence in the Federal Republic of Germany since 1970 (PhD, completed)
  • The Formation of Personal and Collective Regional Identity in the Salzkammergut (MA by Research, in progress)
  • Images of Jewishness in Weimar Film (MA by Research, completed)

Departmental and University roles 2023-24

  • Postgraduate Admissions Tutor for German
  • Undergraduate Admissions Tutor for German
  • Co-Director of the Centre for Research in Philosophy. Literature and the Arts.
  • Co-Director of the Centre for Global Jewish Studies
  • Convenor of the Warwick Workshop for Interdisciplinary German Studies
  • Member of the University Assembly Working Party on Antisemitism
  • Personal Tutor

Selected publications

(for a more complete list click here.)

Books

  • Gespaltene Moderne. Gustav Freytags Soll und Haben - Nation, Geschlecht und Judenbild [Split modernity: Gustav Freytag's Debit and Credit - nation, gender and the image of the Jew], Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2007.
  • Antisemitism, Racism and Islamophobia: Distorted Faces of Modernity, edited with Robert Fine, New York: Routledge, 2015.

Articles and chapters

  • 'Jews and other ‘others’: Identity and constellation in intersectional and critical theory', in Marcel Stoetzler (ed.), Antisemitism and Critical Theory, London: Bloomsbury, 2023, pp. 91-110.
  • 'Bilder von Geschlecht, Judentum und Nation als Konstellation – Intersektionalität und kritische Theorie', in Karin Stögner and Alexandra Colligs (eds.), Kritische Theorie und Feminismus, Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 2022, pp. 75-96.
  • 'Wagners "Judenthum in der Musik" als Rassifizierung der Kulturindustrie'”, in Gross, Raphael, Katharina Schneider and Michael Steinberg (eds.), Richard Wagner und das deutsche Gefühl, Deutsches Historisches Museum/Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2022, pp. 219-227.
  • '"Deutsche Arbeit" und die Poetisierung der Moderne', in Felix Axster and Nikolas Lelle (eds.), »Deutsche Arbeit«: Kritische Perspektiven auf ein ideologisches Selbstbild, Göttingen: Wallstein, 2018, pp. 251-282.
  • 'Orientalism, Occidentalism and Colonialism in Freytag's Images of Jews and Poles', in Ulrike Brunotte, Jürgen Mohn and Christina Späti (eds.), Internal Outsiders - Imagined Orientals? Antisemitism, Colonialism and Modern Constructions of Jewish Identity, Würzburg: Ergon, 2017, pp. 99-110.
  • ‚„Wer immer das jüdische Wesen haßt, der haßt es zunächst in sich“ – Otto Weininger als Theoretiker und Praktiker des Antisemitismus’ [“Whoever hates the Jewish character hates it first in himself” – Otto Weininger as Theorist and Practitioner of Antisemitism], in Hans-Joachim Hahn and Olaf Kistenmacher (eds.), Beschreibungsversuche der Judenfeindschaft. Zur Geschichte der Antisemitismusforschung vor 1944, Berlin: De Gruyter, 2015, pp. 209-233.
  • 'German Modernity, Barbarous Slavs and Profit-seeking Jews: The Cultural Racism of Nationalist Liberals'Link opens in a new window (with Marcel Stoetzler), Nations and Nationalism 19:4, 2013: 739–760.
  • 'Allegories of Destruction: 'The Woman' and 'the Jew' in Otto Weininger's Geschlecht und Charakter'Link opens in a new window, Germanic Review 88:2, 2013: 121-149.
  • 'Threats to modernity, threats of modernity: Racism and antisemitism through the lens of literature’Link opens in a new window, European Societies 14:2, 2012: 240-258.
  • 'Antisemitismus und "Deutsche Arbeit": Zur Selbstzerstörung des Liberalismus bei Gustav Freytag' Link opens in a new window[Antisemitism and "German Labour": On the self-destruction of Liberalism in Gustav Freytag'], in Nicolas Berg (ed.), Kapitalismusdebatten um 1900 - Über antisemitisierende Semantiken des Jüdischen, Leipzig, 2011, pp.361-388.
  • ‘Evoking and Revoking Auschwitz: Kosovo, Remembrance and German National Identity’, in Ronit Lentin (ed.) Re-presenting the Shoah for the 21st Century, New York, Oxford: Berghahn, 2004, pp.227-52
  • ‘Colouring the Invisible: The construction of the “black drug dealer”’, in Birgit Tautz (ed.) Colors 1800/1900/2000: Signs of Ethnic Difference (Amsterdamer Beiträge zur neueren Germanistik, vol. 56), Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2004, pp. 233-54.
  • ‘Engendering airwaves – Zur Konstruktion von Geschlecht im Radio’ [Engendering airwaves - on gender construction in radio] (with Dagmar Brunow, Janina Jentz and Regina Mühlhäuser), in Andreas Stuhlmann (ed.) Radio-Kultur und Hör-Kunst. Zwischen Avantgarde und Popularkultur 1923-2001, Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2001, pp.24-38.

Professional associations

I am a member of the US German Studies Association, the UK Associations for German Studies and Women in German Studies, the US Association for Jewish Studies and the Britih Association for Jewish Studies.

Furthermore, I am a board member of the Research Network 31: Racism and AntisemitismLink opens in a new window of the European Sociological Association and a member of the Research Network Gender in Antisemitism, Orientalism and Occidentalism, the Villigster Forschungsforum zu Nationalsozialismus, Rassismus und AntisemitismusLink opens in a new window and the critical theories of antisemitism networkLink opens in a new window.

Qualifications

  • BSc equiv. Physics (Hamburg)
  • BA equiv. Philosophy (Hamburg)
  • MA Gender and Ethnic Studies (London)
  • PhD German Studies (Nottingham)

Office hour

  • On leave during 2024-25 - please contact me by email for urgent queries

Teaching

Undergraduate modules

GE333 Germany and the Holocaust: Interpretations and DebatesLink opens in a new window

GE312 The Rise of Capitalist Modernity: Gender, Class, IdentityLink opens in a new window

GE 207 German Culture in the Age of Revolution, 1789-1848Link opens in a new window

GE211 Modernity and its DiscontentsLink opens in a new window

GE108 The Changing Face of Germany in Film and Text Link opens in a new window

LN210 Languages and Cultures beyond BoundariesLink opens in a new window

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