About

Annegret Oehme is an Associate Professor and Graduate Program Coordinator in the Department of German Studies at the University of Washington. Originally from Zwickau, Germany, she earned her B.A. in Jewish Studies and German Philology from Freie Universität Berlin in 2008, her M.A. in Medieval German Literature and Language from Freie Universität Berlin in 2011, and completed her Ph.D. in 2016 through the Carolina-Duke Graduate Program in German Studies at Duke University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her research interests include medieval and early modern German and Yiddish literature, as well as cultural transfers within a German-Jewish context. She is currently working on a book project concerning monsters in Old Yiddish literature. Oehme has published articles on pre-modern German and Yiddish literature and translations in various academic journals and edited volumes, and has authored books on Yiddish and German Arthurian adaptations and women's roles in pre-modern Wigalois adaptations. Her scholarly work also includes editing volumes and guest co-editing special issues related to premodern German studies.

Research topics

• Literature
• Art
• Classics
• History
• Sociology
• Computer Science
• Archaeology

Selected publications

• Lucifer’s Shadow: Racial Divides in the Yiddish <i>Bovo d’Antona</i>

  Speculum · 2024-03-29

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  Exploring the constructions of Blackness in this Yiddish text, I argue that within Elia Levita’s Bovo d’Antona (and, similarly, in other Old Yiddish nonreligious, fictional texts), we find formations of a proto-racism that aims at associating the Jewish hero’s body with the Christian-White body. The medieval origins of the text and the anti-Muslim and anti-Black ressentiment transferred into an early modern cultural setting underscore the long trajectory of race-making and the fiction of racial identities. In its conceptualization and instrumentalization of race, Bovo might not be unique, but Levita’s depiction of the Black “heathens” in a text targeted at a truly international audience brings together various geographical, temporal, and religious-cultural traditions mediated by medieval Christianity and heroism. Bovo inherits the medieval Christian “heathen” figure but embeds it in a text focused on a Jewish hero. Rather than engaging with contemporaneous images of enemies or specific representations of Muslims, the text presents an antagonist removed from a specific historical reality and built on (predominantly Christian) general stereotypes. This simplified opponent rather than a specific historical or regional Other1 makes the construction of Otherness more accessible to widespread audiences. The text is centered on a minority culture but deeply embedded in a power discourse that adheres to the tropes of the majority culture. With its broad readership, Bovo d’Antona thus presents the attempt of a minority often racialized and stigmatized by surrounding majority powers to participate in the discourse on race and use it for their own empowerment.

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• Introduction

  Amsterdam University Press eBooks · 2023-10-31

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• Introduction

  2023-09-30

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  MEDIEVAL ROMANCE INCLUDES some of the most well-known medieval texts and authors within its ranks. From their stories of chivalric escapades written in the vernacular of Old French, referred to as romanz, medieval authors birthed the term “romance.” The popularity of medieval romance has scarcely waned since its first iterations in the twelfth century. Literary and film adaptations of medieval romance continue to enjoy immense popularity and directly or indirectly inspire new forms of romance in medieval or medievalesque settings. Ground-breaking scholarship on medieval romance has enthusiastically explored romance as performance or as a structured narrative, or pointed to its connections to misogyny.

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• Introduction: The plurality of Premodern German studies

  The German Quarterly · 2023-03-01

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  Abstract What is German studies for a historical period in which Germany did not exist? This introduction to the special issue on Premodern German Studies advocates for a more inclusive definition of German and a more diverse practice of German studies. Between 800 and 1800, Central Europe was marked by shifting political boundaries, cultural‐religious plurality, linguistic transformations, imperial expansions and contractions, and missionary colonization with its accompanying forms of violence. The contributions in this volume challenge two related preconceptions: that relevant material from majority German‐speaking regions is exclusively in German; and that the regions from which material relevant for German studies originates are solely those where German was or is widely spoken. This issue also seeks to show how premodern studies can support the important work of scholar activists by examining the plurality of time periods, regions, cultures, languages, literatures, and identities encompassed by the expansive field of premodern German studies.

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• Viduvilt

  2022-05-27

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  This chapter explores the Jewish fascination with Arthuriana in a Yiddish context with a focus on the two most famous adaptations: Viduvilt (sixteenth century) and Artis hof (seventeenth century). While often perceived as similar texts subsumed under “Yiddish adaptation” of the Middle High German Wigalois (1210/20) by Wirnt von Grafenberg, these texts display different engagements with the story of the Arthurian knight Viduvilt (Middle High German: Wigalois). Through a comparative analysis, this chapter uncovers the adaptation strategies in Artishof: logification and filling of plot holes, a heroification of the Arthurian knight, and an increase in religious elements. These revisions illuminate a critical engagement with the preceding text as they highlight an inner-Yiddish adaptation process and mark Artishof as a distinct adaptation.

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• Richard Matthew Pollard (Ed.): Imagining the Medieval Afterlife

  Zeitschrift für interkulturelle Germanistik · 2021

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  • Art
  • Literature
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• Preliminary material

  2021-10-18

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• An Arthurian Knight on the Chinese Imperial Throne: Navigating Divine Providence and Cosmopolitan Identity in Gabein (1788/1789)

  2021-10-18

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• The Knight without Boundaries: Yiddish and German Arthurian &lt;i&gt;Wigalois&lt;/i&gt; Adaptations

  2021 · 2 citations

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  • Computer Science
  • Literature
  • History

  This volume explores a core medieval myth, the tale of an Arthurian knight called Wigalois, and the ways it connects the Yiddish-speaking Jews and the German-speaking non-Jews of the Holy Roman Empire. The German Wigalois / Viduvilt adaptations grow from a multistage process: a German text adapted into Yiddish adapted into German, creating adaptations actively shaped by a minority culture within a majority culture. The Knight without Boundaries examines five key moments in the Wigalois / Viduvilt tradition that highlight transitions between narratological and meta-narratological patterns and audiences of different religious-cultural or lingual background.

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• Epilogue

  2021-10-18

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Frequent coauthors

• Katharina von Kellenbach

  1 shared

• Ekaterina Oleshkevich

  1 shared

• Mirjam Thulin

  1 shared

• Yaakov Herskovitz

  1 shared

• Devi Mays

  1 shared

• Viktoria Gräbe

  1 shared

• Lisa Gerlach

  Ruhr University Bochum

  1 shared

• Judith Müller

  Goethe University Frankfurt

  1 shared

Labs

• Department of German StudiesPI

Awards & honors

• TTFI Fellowship (2020)
• Lederman Endowed Scholarship (2023)