Anke Finger

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Associate Professor of German Studies and Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies; Section Chair, German Studies; Graduate Director, German Studies

Education

Ph.D. (Comparative Literature) Brandeis University 1997 

M.A. (Literature and Women's Studies) Brandeis University 1995 

B.A. Studies (Literature and History) University of Konstanz 1991

Areas of Expertise

German and Comparative Modernism 
Media Studies

Interart Studies / Literature and Other Arts
Intercultural Competence / Intercultural Literary Studies

Contact Information

Bio:

Anke Finger received her B.A. equivalent from the University of Konstanz in Germany, where she studied German and American Literature and European History. After an exchange year at Wellesley College in 1989/90, she continued to explore her interests in comparative literature at Brandeis University where she received her M.A. in 1995 and graduated with a Ph.D. in 1997. Before coming to UConn in 2001, she held an assistant professorship in German Studies at Texas A&M University.

Prof. Finger's teaching and research focus on modernism, literature and other arts, contemporary aesthetics, media studies, interculturality, and everyday life theories and practices. The author of a monograph on the total artwork and modernism, Das Gesamtkunstwerk der Moderne (Vandenhoeck&Ruprecht, 2006), she edited (with Danielle Follett) a collection of articles entitled The Aesthetics of the Total Artwork: On Borders and Fragments (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011). Her continuing work on the total artwork includes the discussion of atmospheres as part of an exploration of new phenomenology. This academic year, she was invited to connect the total artwork with Henry van de Velde's ideas, for the 12th Bauhaus-Kolloquium in Weimar. Next, the total artwork will feature in a book project on (inter)sensory perception and the avant-gardes. 

A co-founder (with Rainer Guldin, Università della Svizzera Italiana, Lugano) of Flusser Studies, Anke Finger's related scholarship in media studies centers on the writings of Czech-Brazilian philosopher Vilém Flusser and his interdisciplinary work (including intermedia, aesthetics and perception). The expanded English edition of an introduction to Vilém Flusser, edited and co-authored by Finger, was published in May 2011 by the University of Minnesota Press; it is also available in Portuguese and German. Her next Flusser project will examine the philosopher's multifaceted understanding of creativity. In 2013, she is organizing an international symposium on "Remediating Flusser: From Print-Text to the Image-Flood," a Digital Humanities project.

Flusser also inspired Anke Finger's work on intercultural communication. Other research projects include a collection of essays entitled KulturConfusão: German-Brazilian Interculturalities, co-edited with Gabi Kathoefer and Christopher Larkosh (in preparation for De Gruyter). Outlined as a hybrid project (scholarship/memoir/mixed materials), she is writing a monograph on memory, her family history, everyday life, and the arts in the former German Democratic Republic (East Germany). She blogs at lcldigitalmedia (with Roger Travis) and at interartresearch (with Christiane Heibach) and serves on the editorial boards of Evental Aesthetics and CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture, among other journals.