Department of World Languages & Cultures

Kris Vander Lugt

Assistant Professor

Professor Vander Lugt joined the Department of World Languages and Cultures in 2006. After graduating from the University of Rochester in German and Psychology, she completed her M.A. in Germanic Languages and Literatures at Pennsylvania State University and her Ph.D. in Modern German Culture and Literature at Indiana University. Her primary research areas lie in twentieth and twenty-first century German and Austrian literature, contemporary film, and culture studies, with an emphasis on materiality and the aesthetics of horror. Her dissertation examined representations of the dead and undead body in German-language literary and visual culture since the 1960s, with an eye to correpondences between bodies that are not “properly dead” and specters of nationality, including the ongoing legacy of fascism, the "monstrous birth" of German reunification, and attempts to reconceptualize postwar German masculinity.

Her publications have covered topics ranging from contemporary women's writing to "reunification horror film." A book chapter entitled “Better Living Through Splatter? Christoph Schlingensief's Unsightly Bodies and the Politics of Gore” looks at political and ethical dimensions of splatter, a sub-genre of horror, in the early films of German performance artist Christoph Schlingensief. The chapter is forthcoming with Scarecrow Press in Steffen Hantke's edited anthology, Caligari’s Heirs: The German Cinema of Fear after 1945 (February 2007).

Professor Vander Lugt spent the 2005-2006 academic year in Berlin, where - alongside attempts to navigate the subway during the World Cup Finals - her work included research for a manuscript focusing on the re-emergence of horror film in the mainstream since the German reunification.

Professor Vander Lugt was recently profiled in the West European Studies Faculty Spotlight.

Fall 2006 Teaching

G201 Intermediate German
G330 "Creature Features" (Introduction to German Literature since the Enlightenment)