Leonie Ettinger (M.A. '16)
PS Alum, Leonie Ettinger (M.A. '16), will be a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Berlin Program for Advanced German and European Studies at the Free University of Berlin. The program offers her the opportunity to focus on her research for one year without teaching obligations. She will begin by turning her dissertation into a monograph: A Fatherland for the Fatherless: Crises of Authority in Expressionist Literature. The project investigates literary expressions of political upheaval in interwar Germany, demonstrating the relevance of social tensions during the rise of Nazism for the present day. She will also develop a second monograph project, tentatively titled Shards of Memory: The Diversity of Intergenerational Trauma in Contemporary Germany, which explores the continuing impacts of National Socialism in Germany today.
Leonie earned her PhD in German at New York University in 2023. Leonie researches 20th and 21st-century theater and literature; cultural history; Frankfurt School critical theory; and trauma theory, particularly transgenerational Holocaust trauma. She holds an MA in Performance Studies from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, and a BA in Anthropology and Media from Goldsmiths, University of London. Leonie’s writing has appeared in Marxism in the Age of Trump (2018), Expressionismus (2020), and The Journal of Literature and Trauma Studies (2022), with another article forthcoming in Concepts of Culture: Experiments in Conceptual History (2024). For her essay “Speaking Past: Ruth Klüger’s weiter leben: Eine Jugend,” she was awarded the Alpine Fellowship Academic Writing Prize (2020).