Hester Baer is a MITH Fellow and the Vambery Distinguished Professor of Comparative Studies for 2014–15.  She is an Associate Professor of German at the University of Maryland, where she also serves as a core faculty member in the Film Studies program. Baer’s research interests focus on gender and sexuality in film and media, historical and contemporary feminisms, and German literature and culture in the 21st Century. She is the author of Dismantling the Dream Factory: Gender, German Cinema, and the Postwar Quest for a New Film Language (2009); the guest editor of a special issue of the journal Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature entitled “Contemporary Women’s Writing and the Return of Feminism in Germany” (2011); and the co-editor with Alexandra Merley Hill of the volume German Women’s Writing in the 21st Century (forthcoming in 2014). She is currently working on a new monograph that rethinks the history of German cinema from 1980-2010, German Cinema in the Age of Neoliberalism. Since 2012, Baer has served as President of the Coalition of Women in German.

Past Staff