Research output per year
Research output per year
Associate Professor of German and Gender Studies, FAHA
Research activity per year
I completed my PhD research at the University of Melbourne and postdoctoral fellowships with the Australian Research Council at the University of Melbourne and with the German Academic Exchange Service at the University of Potsdam, Germany. Since 2014 I have been based in the German and Gender Studies programs in the ANU's School of Literature, Languages and Linguistics, Research School of Humanities and the Arts, where I live and work on unceded Ngunnawal and Ngambri Country.
My research and teaching interests focus particularly on German 20th and 21st-century culture, literature, and history, from the cultural dynamism of the Weimar Republic to contemporary trans and queer literature. Much of my research examines the history of gender and sexuality, including a current collaborative project on photography and film in 20th-century sex research.
My latest book, Sexuality in Modern German History (Bloomsbury, 2023) offers a survey study across 200 years of German history, investigating the diverse and often contradictory ways in which individuals, activists, doctors, politicians, artists, social movements and cultural commentators have defined 'normal' sexuality in Germany over the past two centuries, and how these definitions have been used to shape identities, behaviours, bodies and practices.
Sex between Body and Mind: Psychoanalysis and Sexology in the German-speaking World, 1890s-1930s (University of Michigan Press, 2019) is a cultural history of sexuality and medical-scientific sex research examining debates around the sexual life of the child, the nature of shellshock, the origins of homosexuality, trans identity, and the role of the sex hormones. It is the first book to closely examine vital encounters among this era’s German-speaking researchers across their emerging professional and disciplinary boundaries. Reviews: German History, Monatshefte, German Studies Review, Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft, Studies in 20th and 21st Century Literature, Social History of Medicine, Sexuologie.
The Masculine Woman in Weimar Germany (Berghahn Books, 2011) explores the widely-discussed 'masculinization of woman' in 1920s German popular culture, in areas such as fashion, sport, literature, cinema, and magazines produced by newly emerging sexual minorities. It traces the connotations and controversies surrounding this figure from her rise to media prominence in the early 1920s until the beginning of the Nazi period. Reviews: American Historical Review, Choice, German Quarterly, German Studies Review, German History, The Historian, Seminar, Women's History Review, Women in German Newsletter.
Case Studies and the Dissemination of Knowledge (Routledge, 2015), co-edited with Joy Damousi and Birgit Lang, is one of the outcomes of the ARC Discovery Project "Making the Case: The Case Study Genre in Sexology, Psychoanalysis, and Literature" (2010-2014). This collection examines how cases serve as a means of passage between disciplines, genres, and publics, from law to psychoanalysis, and from auto/biography to modernist fiction.
PhD, University of Melbourne
Award Date: 13 Dec 2008
Arts (Degree with Honours), Bachelor, University of Melbourne
Award Date: 8 Mar 2003
Secretary, Executive Committee, German Studies Association of Australia
Dec 2016 → …
Member, Women in German
2009 → …
Member, German Studies Association
2008 → …
Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review
Research output: Book/Report › Book › peer-review
Research output: Contribution to journal › Letter › peer-review
Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review
Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Chapter › peer-review
Sutton, K. & Lang, B.
17/06/19 → 30/12/24
Project: Research