About the Contributors

ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS Bettina T. Becker is a PhD candidate in Germanic Studies and Cultural Studies at Indiana University, Bloomington. She presently teaches at the University of Dallas and is writing her dissertation on the articulations of magazine culture, national identity, and constructions of space in early twentieth-century Germany. Her research focuses on nineteenthand twentieth-century German literature and culture, particularly on issues of gender and the avant-garde, popular culture, and aesthetic and cultural theory. Brenda L. Bethman is a PhD candidate in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and a Graduate Certificate student in the Women's Studies Department. She is currently writing her dissertation, a study of subjectivity, language , and ideology in the works of Elfriede Jelinek. Jeannine Blackwell is Professor and Chair of German at the University of Kentucky. Her research interests include religious autobiography, confessions, and fairy tales. She and Shawn C. Jarvis have compiled and translated the anthology The Queen's Mirror: Fairy Tales by German Women Writers 1780-1900 (U of Nebraska P, forthcoming). She was recently elected president of Women in German. Jeanette Clausen is an Associate Professor of German and Assistant Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs at Indiana University-Purdue University, Fort Wayne. She has published articles on Christa Wolf, Helga Königsdorf, Verena Stefan, and other women writers. She coedited the anthology German Feminism: Readings in Politics and Literature (SUNY 1984), and was coeditor of the Women in German Yearbook from 1987 to 1994. Her translation of Irmtraud Morgner's novel The Life and Adventures of Trobadora Beatrice as Chronicled by Her Minstrel Laura was published in June 2000 by the University of Nebraska Press. Women in German Yearbook 16 (2000) 260About the Authors Siobhan S. Craig recently completed her PhD in Comparative Literature at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Her dissertation focuses on rubble as metaphor in the aftermath of fascism, examining the collapse of existing structures of signification—of subjectivity and history—and the resulting crisis of epistemology in the work of several postwar Italian, German, and French writers and filmmakers. A lecturer in the English Department at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, she is currently working on a book about the failure of masculinity in the films of the Italian director Roberto Rossellini. Barbara Frischmuth was bora in 1941 in Altaussee, Austria. Before studying Orientalistik (Near and Middle Eastern Studies) in Vienna, she prepared for a career as an interpreter of Turkish and Hungarian. Her first book, the autobiographical novel Die Klosterschule (The Convent School, 1968), was well received by the incipient feminist movement. While most of her writings—novels, short stories, radio plays, and essays —are concerned with women protagonists, many also focus on specific conditions in Austria, in particular the relationships between different ethnicities (e.g., her 1998 novel Die Schrift des Freundes [The Friend's Script]). Frischmuth is also well known as an author of fairy tales and children's books. Angelika Führich teaches at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies of the Johns Hopkins University in Washington, DC. She is the author of Aufbrüche des Weiblichen im Drama der Weimarer Republik: Brecht-Fleisser-Horväth-Gmeyner (1992), and has published articles on twentieth-century German women writers, such as Elisabeth Hauptmann, Irmgard Keun, Christa Anita Brück, and Kerstin Specht. She has also written on contemporary immigrant theater and Weimar culture and film. Her current project is a book to be entitled Women and Machines: Gender, Technology, and Work in the German Cultural Imagination of the Interwar Years. Patricia Herminghouse is Karl F. and Bertha A. Fuchs Professor Emerita of German Studies at the University of Rochester. Her research has focused on nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature, particularly on the literature of the GDR, the social contexts of women's writing, and the culture of German emigres in nineteenth-century America. Editor of the textbook anthology Frauen im Mittelpunkt, she was also coeditor (with Peter U. Hohendahl) oí Literatur und Literaturtheorie in der DDR (1976) and DDR-Literatur der 70er Jahre (1983). She is coeditor (with Magda Mueller) of Gender and Germanness: Cultural Productions Women in German Yearbook 16261...