German Studies

Elizabeth Berman studied German and Art History at Brown, writing an honors thesis on sexual difference and technology in the work of Walter Benjamin under the direction of Prof. Gerhard Richter. She subsequently received an M.A. in Gender and Sexuality Studies at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, where she was also a Fulbright Scholar and lecturer. She is currently an M.A. candidate in German Studies and fourth-year doctoral student in the Department of Modern Culture and Media. Her research responds to therapeutic discourses in theories of mediation and bioethical debates, engaging the incurably split and sexuated subject of the unconscious, psychoanalytic and deconstructive accounts of language, and philosophies of cinema and photography to historicize and theorize a conception of life as constitutively divided. In addition to her research, she serves as an assistant editor for the Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, and has taught on subjects including theories of death and reproduction, Holocaust film and literature, and the history of surveillance.