Katie Trumpener
Biography
Katie Trumpener has taught at Yale since 2002. She works and teaches courses on the long history of the European novel, 20th century Germany, European cinema (esp. Central, Eastern and Northern Europe); post-Enlightenment British literature and culture; Anglophone colonial/postcolonial literature; children’s literature; visual culture.
Her first book, Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire (Princeton University Press, 1997) was awarded the Modern Language Association Prize for a First Book and the British Academy’s Rose Mary Crawshay Prize. It used a comparative approach to “English” literature, tracing how literary forms developed in Ireland and Scotland shaped the early literary life of Canada and other British settler colonies. Her further work on Romantic-era fiction includes The Cambridge Companion to Fiction of the Romantic Period (co-edited with Richard Maxwell, 2008); the first critical edition of John Galt’s 1831 Bogle Corbet, or The Emigrants (Edinburgh University Press, 2023); and further essays on Austen and the New Woman novel; on the Romantic Novel in Europe; the impact of the Arabian Nights on European fiction (18th to 20th century).
On The Viewing Platform: The Panorama Between Canvas and Screen (co-ed. with Timothy Barringer, Yale University Press, 2020) explores nineteenth-century panorama paintings and their influence on twentieth-century film, photography, installation art and museology.
She is currently completing two books on German cinema, Captive Audiences: German Cinema and the Occupation of Europe, 1930-1950, and The Divided Screen: The Cinemas of Postwar Germany. She is also working on a comparative project on European modernists and their representations of childhood (in literature, painting, film and music), on a book of essays about Romantic and modernist children’s literature (particularly the picture book) and an essay collection on the “lineages of the European novel”.
She was educated in Canada, the United States, and West Germany. From 1990-2002, she taught at the University of Chicago. She co-edited Modern Philology 1995-2003, served on the Editorial Collective of Public Culture 1995-2010, and currently serves on the editorial boards of German Quarterly, and English Studies in Canada. She received Yale’s Graduate Mentoring Award, and has held Humboldt, Mellon, ACLS, American Academy in Berlin, Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, and Stanford Humanities Center fellowships.
On the Viewing Platform: The Panorama Between Canvas and Screen (co-ed. Timothy Barringer, Yale UP, 2020)
“Stalin Boulevard: Panoramic Vistas and Urban Planning in Eastern European Photobooks,” in Alice Lovejoy and Mari Pajala, eds., Remapping Cold War Media: Institutions, Infrastructures, Networks, Exchanges, Indiana University Press, 2022, 17-42.
“Comitern Media Experiments, The Left in Exile, and World Literature from East Berlin “ in Comintern Aesthetics, ed. Steven Lee and Amelia Glaser. (University of Toronto Press, 2020), pp. 474-504.
“A Eulogy of Failed Remembrance: Alexander Kluge’s Air Raid”, New York Review of Books, Jan. 18, 2024, 40-2.
“On Living in Time.” Periodization. Essays from the English Institute, ed. Virginia Jackson. ACLA Ebook, 2010.
Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire. Princeton UP, 1997.
“The Modernist Picture Book in Three Dimensions,” in Alexandra Gillespie and Deidre Lynch
eds., The Unfinished Book. Oxford University Press, 2020, p. 166-182.
“The Snow Is General All Over Ireland: Irish Modernism and Northern European Drama,” in Canadian Review of Comparative Literature/Revue Canadienne de Littérature Comparée 44:4 (December 2017), 769-788.
Working Languages
German
French
Additional reading languages: Spanish, Italian, Dutch [Yiddish, Danish]
Research Interest
Literary, Film, Art, and Music History
Cultural and Social History
British and Anglophone Literature
German and Central European Literature and Culture
The Transnational History of the Novel. European Drama.
Eighteenth Century, Nineteenth Century, Modernism.
The World Wars and the Cold War.
Visual Culture. Painting, Photography, the Picturebook
Childhood Studies
Education
Publication Highlights
Work in Progress
“Captive Audiences: German Cinema and the Occupation of Europe, 1930-1950”
“The Divided Screen: The Cinemas of Postwar Germany, 1950-2000”
“Nurse’s Song: Modernism in the Nursery”
“The Novel Astray: Lineages of the European Novel”
“From the History of the Picturebook”