Esther Bauer, an assistant professor of German at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point (UWSP), has been chosen for a UW System Fellowship at the Institute for Research in the Humanities at UW-Madison.

"This is a great honor for the department, the College of Letters and Science, and the campus," said Letters and Science Dean Lance Grahn. "Esther’s teaching and scholarship are exemplary and this fellowship is recognition of those talents." According to Grahn, only four such fellowships are awarded systemwide and this is the first ever for the Foreign Language Department.

The fellowship starts in September and will allow her to dedicate her time to writing a book, "Bodily Desire – Desired Bodies: Gender and Desire in Early Twentieth-Century Novels and Paintings," on gender, desire, and the body in early twentieth century German and Austrian literature and art, a time when traditional notions of male and female social roles as well as sexual politics underwent far-reaching transformations in German-speaking countries. Phenomena such as industrialization, World War I, and the women’s emancipation movement led to more women joining the workforce, becoming politically and artistically more active and in general leading more independent lives. As a result, men saw their dominant positions in the social, political, economic and sexual arenas threatened. The ensuing debate between those fighting for either equality of the sexes or the preservation of traditional male and female roles reached a peak at the beginning of the twentieth century.

For her book project, she explores ways in which works by German and Austrian writers and painters did not simply reflect the existing structures, but became sites of negotiation and innovation in this debate and thus instrumental factors in these socio-cultural changes. Her research focuses on novels by writers Thomas Mann, Franz Kafka and Vicki Baum, and on paintings by German New Objectivity artists Otto Dix and Christian Schad, important, but mostly neglected role in the history of sexuality.

A native of Germany, she did her graduate work at the University of Freiburg (Germany), the University of Southampton (England), and at Yale University where she received her doctorate in German Literature.

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