Angelica Fenner

Background

I was born to German parents and raised in western Massachusetts. As an undergraduate, I studied music at Oberlin College in Ohio, spent a year in Freiburg, Germany, and later earned an M.A. in German at the University of Massachusetts/Amherst. I continued my graduate studies at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, and spent nearly three years in Berlin, as a lecturer in English at Humboldt Universität as well as with the support of a dissertation fellowship from the DAAD. After completion of my Ph.D. German and Comparative Literature, I continued to teach at Minnesota as a lecturer in Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature and in French and Italian film. Since joining the faculty in German and in Cinema Studies at the University of Toronto, I have been covering courses in German film history, race and representation, world cinema, film sound, film theory, documentary, and globalization theory.

Teaching Interests

• German Film History
• History & Theory of  Documentary/Non-Fiction Film
• Weimar Culture
• Race & Representation
• World Cinema
• Film Sound
• Film Theory
• Globalization Theory

Current Research Interests

• The thematics of migration in European cinemas, with particular attention to how spatial, social, and psychical displacement assume narrative form.


• Autobiographical Non-Fiction Film  in Contemporary Germany

Recent Publications

Monographs

• Race Under Reconstruction in German Cinema: Robert Stemmle's Toxi. University of Toronto Press, 2011. 284 pp.

The DVD, Robert Stemmle's Toxi (1952) is now available for purchase from the DEFA Film Library at the University of Masschusetts in Amherst. 'Extras' include an audio-commentary read by Angelica Fenner and Tobias Nagl.

Co-Edited Anthologies

• The Auto/Biographical Turn in German Documentary and Experimental Film. Co-edited with Robin Curtis. Camden Press. (In Progress)


• Fascism and Neo-Fascism: Critical Writings
  on the Radical Right in Europe. Co-edited with Eric Weitz. NY: Palgrave, 2004. 284 pp.

Book Chapters and Articles in Refereed Journals

• "Cinematic Discourses of Race and Reconstruction in Transnational Perspective." In From Black to Schwarz: Cultural Crossovers between African America and Germany, eds. Maria Diedrich & Jürgen Heinrichs, 227-244. Münter: LIT Verlag, 2010.


• "Jennifer Fox's Transnational Talking Cure Flying: Confessions of a Free Woman." Journal of Feminist Media Studies 9.4 (2009): 427-445.


• "Aural Topographies of Migration in Yamina Benguigui's Inch'Allah dimanche." Camera Obscura 66 (2007).


• "The Reterritorialization of Enjoyment in the Adenauer Era." In Framing the Fifties: Cinema in a Divided Germany, eds. John Davidson & Sabine Hake, 166-179. NY: Berghahn, 2007.


• "Repetition Trauma and the Tyrannies of Genre in Frieder Schlaich's Otomo ." In Fascism and Neo-Fascism: Critical Writings on the Radical Right in Europe , eds. Angelica Fenner & Eric Weitz, 259-278. NY: Palgrave, 2004.


• "Traversing the Representational Politics of Migration in Xavier Koller's Journey of Hope ." In Moving Pictures, Traveling Identities: Exile, Migration, Border Crossing in Cinema, ed. Eva Rueschmann, 18-38. Oxford: University of Mississippi Press, 2003.


• "Turkish Cinema in the New Europe: Visualizing Ethnic Conflict in Sinan Çetin's Berlin in Berlin. " Camera Obscura 44 (2001): 105-149.


• "Theorizing the Internet: Scholarly Collaboration, Authorial Identity, and the Bounds of Listserver Culture." In After Postmodernism: Austrian Literature and Film in Transition, ed. Willy Riemer, 348-361. Riverside, CA: Ariadne Press, 2001.


• "Versuch eines interkulturellen Dialogs: Mehrstimmigkeit als Erzählstrategie in Helma Sander-Brahms' Shirin's Hochzeit ." Frauen in der Literaturwissenschaft Rundbrief 49 (Dezember 1996): 25-29.

Filmmaker Interviews

• "The Dialogical Documentary: Jennifer Fox on Finding a New Film Language." CineAction 77 (May 2009): 25-33.


• "Seyhan Derin: 'She has her own way of asserting herself.'" Women in German 21 (2005): 43-61.

Review Essays

• Michael Renov. The Subject of Documentary (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2004) in Quarterly Review of Film & Video 25.3 (2008): 251-256.


• Jacqueline Levitin, Judith Plessis, Valerie Raoul, eds. Women Filmmakers Refocusing (NY: Routledge, 2003) in Jump Cut 49 (Spring 2007) <www.eJumpcut.org>.


• Caryl Flinn. The New German Cinema: Music, History, and the Matter of Style (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004) in Journal of Film Music 1.4 (Winter 2006).


• Linda Schulte-Sasse. Entertaining the Third Reich: Illusions of Wholeness in Nazi Cinema (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996) in Film Quarterly 54.1 (Fall 2000): 44-46.

Recent Book Reviews

• Christine Haase. When Heimat Meets Hollywood: German Filmmakers and America, 1985-2005 (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2007) in German Studies Review 33.3 (October 2010): 706-7.


• Tobias Nagl. Die unheimliche Maschine: Rasse und Representation im Weimarer Kino. (München: Edition Text+Kritik, 2009) in Film Blatt 15.43 (Fall 2010)


• Heide Fehrenbach. Race after Hitler: Black Occupation Children in Postwar Germany and America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005) German Studies Review 31.1 (February 2008): 178-79.


• Nora Alter & Lutz Köpnick, eds. Sound Matters: Essays on the Acoustics of Modern German Culture (New York: Berghahn Books, 2004) in German Studies Review 30.1 (February 2007): 235.


• Ian Balfour & Atom Egoyan, eds. Subtitles: On the Foreignness of Film. (Boston: MIT Press, 2004) in Journal of Popular Film & Television 34.2 (June 2006): 95-96.


• Tim Bergfelder, Erica Carter, and Deniz Göktürk, eds., The German Cinema Book (London: BFI, 2002) in Film-Philosophy, 8.7 (February 2004) <www.film-philosophy.com>.


• Susan Linville, Feminism, Film, Fascism: Women's Auto/Biographical Film in Postwar Germany (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998) in Women in German Newsletter 90 (Spring 2003): 16-18.


• Thomas Elsaesser, Ed. The BFI Companion of German Cinema (NY: BFI, 1999) in German Studies Review: 384-85.

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