Anna Elizabeth Hunt
Dr. Hunt is an assistant professor in the Germanic department.
What is the focus of your current work and/or subject of your current research?
My first book is provisionally titled Sites of Grief: Mourning, Politics, Forgiveness. It’s an expansion of my dissertation, “Taking the World by Storm: Forgiveness in the Early Writings of Walter Benjamin.” Sites of Grief looks beyond Benjamin to study works of art and literature that transform the spectacles of bodies exposed to and by state-sanctioned violence into sites of resistance. These works of art not only expose the ungrievability produced by the state, they experiment with modes and frames that open the possibility of mourning what has been rendered unmournable. In changing the angle from which the body is viewed, in providing some mediation between the eye and the body, in many cases by foregrounding the mourner rather than the body, these works imbue mourning with political power and prompt a reimagination of the world from the ground up.
What classes do you teach? What are some of the topics of those classes?
I am currently teaching GER 199 The Holocaust and the Discourse of Human Rights for the Campus Honors Program. This is a new class that I am teaching for the first time this semester and it is intended to become a staple of the German department curriculum as a sequel to my GER 261 The Holocaust in Context class. Broadly speaking, my classes circle around issues of mourning and unmourning, for instance, I also teach a class on Tales of Horror for undergraduates.
My graduate graduate classes have focused on Fascist aesthetics; I also taught one called Sites of Grief, which unpacked the connexion between critique and mourning from Frankfurt School to contemporary critique and criticism.
Do you have any recent awards, honors, or publications that you would like to highlight?
I am a member of the Spring 2024 Inclusive Pedagogy Certificate Program cohort.
The EU Center awarded me a Title VI National Resource Center Grant to develop GER 199 CHP The Holocaust and the Discourse of Human Rights.
What is a book (academic or non-academic, in or outside your field) that you think should be more widely read?
Antigone
Is there any additional information or advice you'd like to share?
UIUC's Germanic department is tiny but mighty. We have incredible professors and we offer classes in English as well as German. We also have a vibrant student community. German literature and philosophy may seem niche interests but if you are interested in media, literature, contemporary thought, genocide and memory studies, race and gender, performance studies, activism, disability studies, critiques of capitalism, multilingualism, conversations around founding robust multicultural public spheres... then German is really the place to be. Check us out!