Leslie A. Adelson

Leslie A. Adelson a Non-Resident Fellow at AGI and the Jacob Gould Schurman Professor of German Studies at Cornell University and a graduate field member there in Comparative Literature; Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies; and Jewish Studies. Former chair of Cornell University’s Dept. of German Studies, she teaches modern German literature, with an emphasis on literature since 1945, and postcolonial theories of culture and history. Much of her research has focused on minority discourses and migrant cultures in postwar Germany, especially those concerning Jews and Turks, and on interdisciplinary German cultural studies. For her overall contributions to the field of postwar German cultural studies she received the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) Prize for Distinguished Scholarship in 1996. Major books include Crisis of Subjectivity (1984), Making Bodies, Making History: Feminism and German Identity (1993), and The Turkish Turn in Contemporary German Literature: Toward a New Critical Grammar of Migration (2005). Adelson’s English-language edition of Zafer Şenocak’s Atlas of a Tropical Germany (2000) introduced a new sort of public intellectual in Germany to an international audience. An edited volume titled The Cultural After-Life of East Germany (2002) pivoted on transnationalism in contemporary German contexts. Current projects address the literary imagination, the status of futurity in German literature in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and the experimental prose of Alexander Kluge. Adelson has held research fellowships from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities. She is the former director of Cornell University’s interdisciplinary Institute for German Cultural Studies.