Katrin Pahl

Katrin Pahl

Professor of German

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Research Interests: German literature and philosophy in comparative perspective (US and French); the theory, poetics and history of emotionality, gender and sexuality; contemporary theater; Hegel; Kleist

Education: PhD, University of California, Berkeley

Modern Languages and Literatures > People > Katrin Pahl

Katrin Pahl received her PhD from the Department of Rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley. In addition to her work in the Department of German and Romance Languages and Literatures, she has served for many years as co-director of the Program for the Study of Women, Gender, and Sexuality. The arc of her research is situated in the field of affect and emotion studies with an emphasis on gender and sexuality.

Her first book, Tropes of Transport: Hegel and Emotion (Northwestern UP, 2012) demonstrates that a fresh analysis of Hegel’s thought offers an important resource for the theory of emotionality. It addresses emotions as transformational forces, which carry one out of oneself and to a different self, while introducing impersonal transports, such as release, juggle, acknowledging, tremble, and broken.

Sex Changes with Kleist (Northwestern UP, 2019) shows that Kleist responded to the historical sex change (the emergence of the second sex and ensuing condemnation of same-sex desire) by multiplying the sex changes. Focusing on his theater – on the theatricality of his interventions and on the way his dramatic texts unhinge major tenets of classical European theater – Pahl probes Kleist’s appreciation for incoherence, his experimentation with alternative symbolic orders, his provocative understanding of emotion, and his camp humor. She proposes that sex might change again if we learn, with Kleist, to see what has long remained invisible and to speak to what could otherwise continue to remain unintelligible: queer female desire.

Pahl currently pursues two research projects, one on queer procreation and one on patterns of (sexualized) violence. Under the heading of procreation, rather than reproduction, the first inquiry develops the sensorium for new, unseen, and unheard-of forms of queer life. This involves thinking kinship beyond the apotheosis of the human. In the other study, Pahl analyzes contemporary political theater, narrative, and multimedia art in order to trace the interrelation of sexualized and ecological violence, war, migration, and psychic life.

Pahl was awarded the Best Article in Feminist Scholarship Prize from the Coalition of Women in German for “Transformative Translations: Cyrillizing and Queering” and has given the Kenneth Weisinger Lecture at the University of California, Berkeley. She was a Fellow of the Cluster of Excellence “Languages of Emotion” at the Freie Universität Berlin and a Senior Fellow at the International Research Institute for Cultural Technologies and Media Philosophy (IKKM), Weimar.