Brigitta Wagner
Assistant Professor of Germanic Studies
Adjunct Assistant Professor of Communication and Culture (Film Studies)
Ph.D. Harvard University, 2008
E-mail: bbwagner@indiana.edu
About Brigitta:
Brigitta Wagner arrived in Bloomington in 2008 after receiving her Ph.D. in Germanic Languages and Literatures and Film and Visual Studies from Harvard University. From 2000-02 and 2005-06, she attended the Seminar für Filmwissenschaft at the Freie Universität Berlin. With fellowships from DAAD, Fulbright, Dartmouth’s Alfred K. Priest, and the Harvard Humanities Center, she has explored the intersection of urban nostalgia, cinema, and location politics in the postwall German capital. Her current book project examines the convergence of the urban and cinematic revival of Berlin as a means of memorializing and controlling city space and its multitemporal associations. Other interests include the spatial geographies of contemporary German cinema, Cold War mediascapes, and early film hermeneutics.
As a teacher and a scholar, Dr. Wagner believes in the combination of theory and practice and encourages students to become not only “critical,” but also “creative,” thinkers. In order to activate scholarship for 21st-century media and communication contexts, she has developed The Film Series Praxis Course, which links traditional historical and theoretical inquiry in the film and cultural studies classroom with public outreach, cultural production, and arts management. She has taught courses on German language and culture and film analysis, history, and theory as well as on the intersection of cinema and urban studies. In addition, she writes film criticism, attends numerous film festivals, works for the Telluride Film Festival, and is currently editing on a documentary about the geographies of desire between Israel and Berlin.
In 2010, Dr. Wagner directed the Indiana University DEFA Project and the DEFA Dialogues. For more information on the DEFA Dialogues, please click here, and here
.Recent courses at Indiana University:
Undergraduate:
GER E322: Berlin, Berlin
GER E323: German Cinema after the Wall
GER G418: Back in the GDR!
GER E323: What Is Cinema? Theories of Film in the European Tradition
GER E322: Inside/Outside: Being German after 1989
GER G418: German Silent Cinema
GER E322: The City of Moving Images
Graduate:
GER G627: Cinema of the Wende
GER G627: Graduate Film Analysis
