Anke Biendarra
· Associate Professor and Chair of European Languages and Studies; German Core FacultyUniversity of California, Irvine · German Studies
Active 1999–2025
About
Anke Biendarra is an Associate Professor of European Languages and Studies at UC Irvine, where she also served as Faculty Director of the UCI Study Abroad Center from 2018 to 2023 and as Faculty Director for Northern Europe in the University of California Study Abroad Programs (UCEAP) from 2015 to 2018. She holds a Ph.D. from the University of Washington, Seattle, and an M.A. from the University of Muenster in Germany. Her research interests encompass German and European literature and culture of the 20th and 21st centuries, with particular focus on pop literature, GDR/reunification, critical European culture studies, migration studies, transnationalism, memory studies, and gender studies. Biendarra has received numerous academic distinctions, including the Gisela Brinker-Gabler Outstanding Essay Award in 2022 and the Humanities Teaching Award at UCI in 2015. Her scholarly work includes a focus on how narratives of migration, war, and European identity shape collective memory and cultural imaginaries, especially through transcultural and postnational frameworks. Her first book, 'Germans Going Global: Contemporary Literature and Globalization' (2012), critically analyzes globalization's impact on German-language literature, authorship, and identity in the post-unification era. Currently, she is working on a book project titled 'Memories of Migration: The European Imaginary in Transcultural German-Language Literature,' which examines how contemporary prose by transcultural writers contributes to a multidirectional memory model that transcends national boundaries and redefines European collective memory.
Research topics
- Art
- Humanities
- Political Science
- Sociology
- Media studies
- Law
- Political economy
- Geology
- Aesthetics
Selected publications
Über den Erfolg der Weltautorin Jenny Erpenbeck
2025-01-01
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingMonatshefte · 2025-07-01
article1st authorCorrespondingContinuum · 2024-02-16
article1st authorCorrespondingThe article first contextualizes the European Balcony Project (EBP), a manifesto written by authors Ulrike Guérot, Robert Menasse, and theatre director Milo Rau who subsequently put it up for discussion in various public fora. On 10 November 2018, artists and citizens performed the manifesto and proclaimed the European Republic from (theatre) balconies and public places in 25 European countries. They encouraged a dialogue that sought to promote a more diverse public sphere. In my reading, the EBP emerges as a contemporary version of Oskar Negt's and Alexander Kluge's public counter sphere, as a real and imaginary community in which political participation is enacted through the medium of talk in an arena of discursive interaction and democratic practice. By reading the texts in the context of a political avantgarde project, I show how the interventions aim to set a counterpoint to the resurgence of nationalism and promote a vision of a democratic continent based in shared values. My article thus illustrates how public art performances such as the EBP contribute to the thickening of imaginative relations throughout Europe and might aid in the construction of a larger European cultural identity.
Die Welt als Dorf: Neue Heimatromane von Dörte Hansen und Juli Zeh aus<i>ecocritical</i>Perspektive
Monatshefte · 2022 · 3 citations
1st authorCorresponding- Humanities
- Humanities
- Art
This essay focuses on the question of how relationships between humans and nature, <i>Heimat</i> and the provinces are negotiated narratively and aesthetically in <i>Mittagsstunde</i> (2018) by Dorte Hansen and <i>Unterleuten</i> (2016) by Juli Zeh. I read both novels as part of a new <i>Rural Criticism</i> that seeks to problematize human life in the Anthropocene and is committed to the critical interpretation of contemporary histories and realities. Both texts illustrate the urgent ecocrit-ical problems that the process of our civilizing nature, its economic utilization, and the climate crisis have engendered. I show that in the novels, weather, natural spaces, the protection of the environment, and alternative energies serve as catalysts for moving the plot forward. At the same time, these phenomena illustrate the close enmeshment of the characters with the surrounding natural world and the way it shapes their identity. Ultimately, I argue that while both texts can be read as manifestations of <i>solastalgia</i>, they also represent aesthetic approaches to climate change and environmental destruction that could aid in the establishment of a New Climatic Regime (Bruno Latour). (ASB, in German)
2022-12-06
paratextOpen accessRegenerating Europe in Sieben Sprünge vom Rand der Welt
2022-12-06
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingMonatshefte · 2021-03-26
article1st authorCorrespondingLiteraturgeschichte der deutschen Einheit 1989–2000. Fremdheit zwischen Ost und West. Von Arne Born. Hannover: Wehrhahn, 2019. 652 Seiten. €39,80. Fittingly published in the year of the thirtieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, Arne Born’s Literaturgeschichte der deutschen Einheit
Monatshefte · 2021 · 2 citations
1st authorCorresponding- Geology
Fragile Realities: Discussions among Writers about Contemporary Europe
Colloquia Germanica · 2020 · 1 citations
1st authorCorresponding- Political Science
- Sociology
- Political Science
The essay analyzes recent responses by intellectuals to the discourse of “crisis” concerning Europe’s unity and its future, which has been dominating discussions about the European project. It first surveys the European Writers Conference held in Berlin in 2014 and interprets its Manifesto, then analyzes a series of letter exchanges between European authors that was published in 2016-17. Both of these endeavors, which have involved about sixty writers from inside and outside of the E.U., give insight into how intellectuals view the current state of Europe and how they configure what might be called a European cultural identity in the twenty-first century. Through a dialogue that promotes the significance of a public sphere in and about Europe, the projects showcase the difference between political and cultural discourse. They are read here as an attempt to reestablish a European Republic of Letters that should play a prominent role in the continuation and reorientation of the European cultural project.
Europe in Contemporary German-Language Literatur
Colloquia Germanica · 2020-01-01
article1st authorCorresponding
Frequent coauthors
- 7 shared
Gail K. Hart
- 4 shared
Sabine Wilke
University of Washington
- 2 shared
Gail K. Hart
- 1 shared
Friederike Eigler
Georgetown University
Awards & honors
- Gisela Brinker-Gabler Outstanding Essay Award, Council for E…
- Dean’s Honoree, Humanities Teaching Award, UCI (2015)
- American Postdoctoral Fellowship, American Association of Un…
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