Dr. Emily Allegra Dreyfus
Postdoctoral Researcher, Postdoc Network Brandenburg
Emily Allegra Dreyfus is a cultural historian of Cinema and Media and a Brandenburg Postdoctoral Researcher at the Film Uni since 2022. She holds degrees in German Studies, Classics, and Comparative Literature from the universities of Oxford, Göttingen and Chicago. Her 2020 PhD considered the political and aesthetic dimensions of classical music in Nazi-era cinema. Integrating analytical approaches from Film and Literary Studies as well as Musicology, her work to date addresses the aesthetics of feeling in visual culture; the unfolding of music and images in time; and the cultural and historical contingencies of emotional self-understanding. Past research has been supported by the Fulbright Commission, the DAAD, the Berlin Program for Advanced German and European Studies and the Josephine De Kármán Foundation. In 2019 she was a guest researcher at Cinepoetics at the FU; from 2020-2022 she taught as a lecturer in the Humanities at the University of Chicago. Her current research project ‘Survival Satire’ considers Holocaust-era comics and graphic novels produced in European detention camps. Beyond academia, Emily is an active freelance musician.
Research Areas:
Film Studies; Literary Studies; Musicology; German Studies; European and American Cultural History
Teaching and Research Interests:
Film and Animation History
Mass Culture; Graphic Novel, Aesthetics and Theory
Music and Audio-visuality
History of National Socialism
Everyday History and Remembrance Culture
Materiality and Mediality
Publications
Monograph
Dreyfus, E. A. (2023, forthcoming). Celluloid Sensibilities: Music and Sexual Personae in Nazi Film.
Journal Articles and Contributions to Edited Volumes
2022, forthcoming. ‘From Stereotype to Sample. In Search of Beethoven on Screen’. In Beethoven in Context, edited by John Wilson and Glenn Stanley. Cambridge University Press.
2021. ‘Dienst an der ernsten und großen Musik? Philharmoniker als verzwicktes Zeitdokument der NS-Kulturpolitik.’ Filmblatt 75 (Spring 2021).
2020. ‘Widerhall des Unbehagens. Beethoven im NS-Kino’. In Vom Klang Bewegt: Das Kino und Ludwig van Beethoven, edited by Stephan Ahrens. Berlin: Bertz und Fischer.
Reviews
2019. Review of Klang als Geschichtsmedium. Perspektiven für eine auditive Geschichtsschreibung, edited by Anna Langenbruch. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2018. H-Soz-Kult, June 7.
2018. Review of Musical Modernism and German Cinema from 1913 to 1933, by Francesco Finocchiaro. London, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. Filmblatt 66/67 (Autumn).
Selected Presentations
2022‘Acoustic Anagnorisis: Wagner under Erasure between the Third Reich and Hollywood’, Princeton University, German Department (January 2022)
2019 ‘Musical Interludes and Zones of Political Consensus in German Cinema under National Socialism’, Annual Conference of the German Studies Association, Portland, Oregon (October 2019)