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 (18^th to 20^th century).

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. 

Research Interests

• 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

Publications

Selected Recent Publications

• “A Eulogy of Failed Remembrance: Alexander Kluge’s Air Raid”, New York Review of Books, Jan. 18, 2024, pp. 40-2. 
• “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, pp. 17-42.
• “On The Viewing Platform: The Panorama Between Canvas and Screen,” co-ed. with Timothy Barringer, Yale University Press, 2020.
• “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.
• “The Modernist Picture Book in Three Dimensions,” in Alexandra Gillespie and Deidre Lynch  eds., The Unfinished Book, Oxford University Press, 2020, pp. 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, pp.769-788.
• “On Living in Time.” Periodization. Essays from the English Institute, ed. Virginia Jackson. ACLA Ebook, 2010. 
• The Cambridge Companion to Fiction of the Romantic Period, co-edited with Richard Maxwell, Cambridge University Press, 2008.
• “The Arabian Nights, Arab-European Literary Influence, and the Lineages of the Novel,” with Rebecca Johnson and Richard Maxwell. Special Issue on Globalization, MLQ 68:2, June 2007, pp. 243–79.
• “World Music, World Literature: A Geopolitical View,” Comparative Literature in an Age of Globalization, ed. Haun Saussy. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006, pp. 185–202.
• “Old Movies: The Cinema as Palimpsest in GDR Literature,” New German Critique 82: Special Issue on East German Film, Winter 2001, pp. 39–76.
• Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire, Princeton UP, 1997.

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”