Before joining the MLL faculty at Rhodes in 2009, Elizabeth Bridges served for four years as a visiting professor at Hendrix College, where she taught all levels of German, as well as courses in Comparative Literature and Film Studies, on topics such as Other Worlds in Literature, Coming of Age, and German Cinema. Her teaching interests include the Bildungsroman, the Faust theme, the Uncanny, representations of science and technology in literature and film, constructions of gender and sexuality, and film adaptations of literary texts.
After receiving her B.A. in English with Distinction from Hendrix College in 1995, she spent a year on the Congress-Bundestag Exchange for Young Professionals, which included study at the Universität Hamburg and an internship at Gruner+Jahr publishing company. In 1998 she completed her M.A. in German at the University of Arkansas, where she also worked as an editorial and teaching assistant. She went on to Indiana University in Bloomington, where she spent her first year as a Max Kade Fellow and subsequently served as an Associate Instructor in German for four years. She also taught on the university′s summer program in Graz, Austria, and spent 2001-2002 at the Freie Universität Berlin as a Fulbright Research Fellow. In 2005 she completed her Ph.D. in German with an outside concentration in the Department of Communication and Culture.
Her dissertation, Die Mensch-Maschine: Technologies of Replication and Reproduction in German Literature and Culture, discusses representations of the mechanical human in key German texts since 1770. As she expands her previous work into a monograph, her continued research deals with 18th- and 19th-century European visual culture and discourses on gender and technology in the context of traveling automaton exhibitions. Her interest in visual culture also extends to pedagogy with her 2009 article "Bridging the Gap: A Literacy-Oriented Approach to the Graphic Novel Der erste Frühling," which was honored by the AATG as Best Article of the Year.
In her spare time, she enjoys Taekwondo, cooking, creative writing, and geeky TV shows.
Books:
Nazisploitation!: The History, Aesthetics and Politics of the Nazi Image in Low-Brow Film and Culture. (Editor with K. Vander Lugt and D. Magilow). New York: Continuum Group, 2011. Editing the section on depictions of Nazi science.
Die Mensch-Maschine: Mechanical Life in the German Imagination. Currently revising.
Articles / Book Chapters:
"Reproducing the Fourth Reich: Cloning, Nazisploitation, and Redundancy of the Repressed." In Nazisploitation!: The History, Aesthetics and Politics of the Nazi Image in Low-Brow Film and Culture. New York: Continuum Group, 2011. Forthcoming.
"Utopia through the Back Door: Kleist′s Marionettes and the Mechanics of Self-Consciousness." Forthcoming from Seminar.
"Bridging the Gap: A Literacy-Oriented Approach to the Graphic Novel Der erste Frühling." Die Unterrichtspraxis / Teaching German. 42:2 (Fall 2009).
"Grimm Realities: Buffy the Vampire Slayer and the Uses of Folklore." In Buffy Meets the Academy. Kevin Durand, ed. Jefferson, NC: McFarland Publishers, 2009.