Hester Baer

Dr. Hester Baer joined the faculty of the University of Maryland in Fall 2013. She served as the Department Head of German Studies from 2015-2019. She is also a core faculty member in Cinema and Media Studies and Comparative Literature, and an affiliate faculty member in the Harriet Tubman Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies.

Professor Baer currently serves as co-editor of the German Quarterly, the flagship journal in the field. She previously served a three-year term as co-editor of the journal Feminist German Studies (2019-21). Baer's research interests focus on gender and sexuality in film and media; historical and contemporary feminisms; environmental humanities; and German literature and culture in the 21st Century. Her books include Dismantling the Dream Factory: Gender, German Cinema, and the Postwar Quest for a New Film Language (Berghahn, 2009); German Cinema in the Age of Neoliberalism (Amsterdam UP, 2021), and a monograph about postwar Germany's first feminist film, Ula Stöckl's The Cat Has Nine Lives (1968) for the series "German Film Classics" (Camden House, 2022). With Jill Suzanne Smith, Baer is the co-editor of the new volume Babylon Berlin, German Visual Spectacle, and Global Media Culture (Bloomsbury, 2024). She is currently undertaking research, funded by an Insight Development Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (2022-24), for a new monograph, co-authored with Angelica Fenner, Feminist Film History Reframed: The Ulm Film School, 1962-68.

Baer's publications on feminisms in the German context include "Women's Film Authorship in Neoliberal Times: Revisiting Feminism and German Cinema" (2018), a special issue of Camera Obscura co-edited with Angelica Fenner; "Redoing Feminism: Digital Activism, Body Politics, and Neoliberalism" (Feminist Media Studies, 2015); and "Digital Feminisms and the Impasse: Time, Disappearance, and Delay in Neoliberalism," co-authored with Carrie Smith-Prei and Maria Stehle (Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature, 2016). Baer has also served as the guest editor of a special issue of Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature (2011), entitled "Contemporary Women's Writing and the Return of Feminism in Germany"; and a co-editor, with Alexandra Merley Stewart, of German Women's Writing in the Twenty-First Century (Camden House, 2015). Baer is the translator and co-editor, with Elizabeth Baer, of The Blessed Abyss: Inmate #6582 in Ravensbrück Concentration Camp for Women by Nanda Herbermann (Wayne State UP, 2000), originally published in Germany in 1946. 

Together with Professor Michele M. Mason (Japanese, UMD), Baer is the co-organizer of a collaborative research and teaching project that interrogates the concept of futurity in the context of environmental activism and artistic engagement with atomic issues from 1945 to the present. Baer and Mason are co-editors of a volume, Nuclear Futures in the Post-Fukushima Age: Literature, Film, and Performance from Germany and Japan, forthcoming in the series Literatures, Cultures, and the Environment (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024).

Professor Baer received her Ph.D. in German from Washington University in St. Louis, where she also earned a graduate certificate in Women's Studies. Her education included a fellowship from the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) to conduct research in Berlin and exchange years in Tübingen and Vienna. After completing her degree, she spent a year at Duke University as the Lisa Lee and Marc Ewing Postdoctoral Fellow in German Studies and Women's Studies. Before coming to Maryland, Professor Baer taught German and Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Oklahoma, where she was named Associates Second Century Presidential Professor. Baer has served as the President of the South Central Modern Language Association and as the President of the Coalition of Women in German. The recipient of a Fulbright award for travel to Germany in 2004, she spent summer 2012 in Berlin on a DAAD Research Visit Grant. In 2014-15, she held the Clara and Robert Vambery Distinguished Professorship of Comparative Studies at UMD and was a fellow at the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities. She currently serves as the University of Maryland's inaugural Mellon Humanities Fellow for the Big Ten Academic Alliance's Academic Leadership Program (2023-25).

At the University of Maryland, Baer teaches a wide range of courses in German language, literature, and culture, film studies, and theory. Her recent undergraduate courses include "Thinking, Feeling, and Sensing: Film Theory and the Experience of Cinema," "Feminist Film and Media Theory," "Berlin - Capital of the 20th Century," and "Nazis, Terrorists, and Spies: Coming to Terms with the Past and Present in Recent German Film." Her graduate seminars include "German Literature in the 21st Century," "Weimar Culture," “All Power to the Imagination!: 1968 and German Culture,” and "Future Tense: Speculative Visions in German Culture."