Katrin Dettmer - Graduate Student
German Studies
Entered Brown Fall 2006, ABD.
Before coming to Brown, Katrin studied English and German literature at the University of Birmingham (UK) and Humboldt University Berlin, where she received her M.A. in English literature. Her research interests include German literatures after World War II and the Holocaust, which deal with issues of trauma, memory, and remembrance, and in particular the works of W. G. Sebald, Walter Kempowski, and Alexander Kluge; British and German Modernist Fiction; Media Studies (film, photography, radio, and new media) and the intermediality of literature; Aesthetics of Presence. Katrin’s research now focuses on GDR literature and intellectual life as well as (postdramatic) theater and Performance Studies.
Katrin is currently working on her dissertation, which investigates history and performance in the plays of Heiner Müller, entitled Die Berührung der Toten: Geschichte und Performanz in Heiner Müllers Dramatik.
Degrees
2005 M.A. in English Literature, Humboldt Universität zu Berlin, Germany. Thesis Title: The Negotiation of History in Evelyn Waugh’s Early Novels
Conferences
2006 “No place in reality: The autonomy of reflection and the diminution of the subject in W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz” at Mirrorings: Reflections on Reflection (Harvard Humanities Center Interdisciplinary Graduate Conference)
2007 “Suicide & Biopower: Elias Canetti’s Auto-Da-fé” at In the Flesh (Harvard University Department of German Studies Graduate Conference)
2010 "Zwischen Literaturwissenschaft und Performanztheorie" at Anything Goes? (Practices of Literature Graduate Conference, Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster)
2011 "All of a Sudden, There Was This Split: Heiner Müller's Traumatic Narratives" at Twists of the New Aesthetic Turn (ACLA, Vancouver)
2011 "Speaking the Unspeakable: W. G. Sebald's Traumatic Narratives" at Realism and History in Current Literature (GSA, Louisville)
2011 Co-Organizer of the Graduate Student Conference (Re)Making Myths (Departments of German Studies and History, Brown University)
Reviews
2011 "Nothing strange: The Threepenny Opera at the Pell Chafee Performance Center in Providence, RI as part of the Brown/Trinity Rep M.F.A. Programs in Acting & Directing, May 12 – 22, 2011" forthcoming in Communications from the International Brecht Society.
Theatre
2008 Dramaturg for the Brown University production of Hamletmachine, directed by José Enrique Macián.
2009 Dramaturg for the Brown University production of Cabaret, directed by Don Mays.
2009 Director of Shakespeare on the Green’s production of Coriolanus, adapted for the stage by Katrin Dettmer.
2011 Dramaturg for the Brown University production of Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde, directed by Kym Moore.
