Gail M. Newman

Gail Newman

Chair of Center for Global Languages, Literatures & Cultures, Chair of German and Russian, Harold J. Henry Professor of German

413-597-2378
Hollander Hall Rm 318
At Williams since 1983

Education

B.A. Northwestern University (1976)
M.A. University of Minnesota (1981)
Ph.D. University of Minnesota (1984)

Areas of Expertise

German Literature and Culture 1770-1830
Psychoanalytic Theory
Turn-of-the Century and Twentieth-Century Austria

Courses

GERM 207 / GBST 207 LEC

Vienna 1900-2000 and Beyond (not offered 2024/25)

GERM 271 SEM

From Kleist to Kafka (not offered 2024/25)

GERM 277 SEM

Dangerous Minds/Endangered Minds in the German Tradition (not offered 2024/25)

COMP 304 SEM

Confusion of Tongues and Intermediate Areas: Ferenczi, Winnicott, and Literature (not offered 2024/25)

GERM 306 TUT

Enlightenment and its Discontents (not offered 2024/25)

GERM 315 / COMP 316 SEM

Kafka and His/Our World (not offered 2024/25)

COMP 320 TUT

Kafka
(not offered 2024/25)

GERM 320 SEM

German Romanticism (not offered 2024/25)

GERM 323 TUT

Reason, Unreason and Anti-Reason from the Enlightenment to the Third Reich (not offered 2024/25)

GERM 331 / COMP 347 TUT

Silence, Loss, and (Non)Memory in Austria 1900-the Present (not offered 2024/25)

COMP 340 / ENGL 363 SEM

Literature and Psychoanalysis (not offered 2024/25)

Scholarship/Creative Work

“Confusion of Tongues:” Language, Trauma, and Transformation in Ingeborg Bachmann’s ‘Simultan’.” Journal of Austrian Studies 53.2 (September 2020).

“Reading and Teaching Citizen: An American Lyric.” Clio’s Psyche 24.3 (2018) (online)

“Fractal Histories: Constructing Psychoanalytic Truth in Gerhard Roth’s The Lake.” American Imago 74/2 (2017). 111-139.

“Narrating Silence: Gerhard Roths Am Abgrund.” German Quarterly 88.2 (2015). 204-218.

“Pregnancy, Thirdness and the Aesthetics of Catastrophe in Heinrich von Kleist.” Psychoanalytic QuarterlyLXXXI/1 (2012). 127-156.

“Guter Hoffnung? Pregnancy and Narrative in Two Romantic Märchen.” Women in German Yearbook 26 (2010). 30-53.

Using the Object in the Classroom,” Association for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society (Fall 2008)

“Communicating and Not Communicating the `Eternal Feminine’ in Goethe’s Faust II and Mahler’s Eighth Symphony.” Creativity Seminar of the Erikson Institute, Austen Riggs Center, Stockbridge, Massachusetts (Summer 2005)

“Das poetische Subjekt, der ‘intermediäre Raum’, und die Ästhetisierung der Frau.” In Novalis. Poesie und Poetik. Ed. Herbert Uerlings.(Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 2004).

“Secrets and Substitutions: The Dialectic of Enlightenment Adoption in Lessing’s Nathan der Weise and Kleist’s “Der Findling.” Northeast American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, University of Vermont, Burlington, VT (Fall 2004)

“Telling Conditions: Pregnancy and Narrative in Heinrich von Kleist’s `Marquise of O…’.” Friday Night Lecture Series of the Erikson Institute for Education and Research of the Austen Riggs Center, February 2003

“Narrating the Asymbolic Subject in Hoffman’s Der Sandmann” (Seminar, 1997)

Locating the Romantic Subject: Novalis with Winnicott (Wayne State University Press, 1997)

“Family Violence in Kleist’s Der Findling” (Colloquia Germanica, 1996)

Research in Progress

“Rendering Psychotic Speech”
“Shifting Subjectivities in Heinrich von Kleist and Gerhard Roth

Other Posts

Director, Urban Scholars program, 1996-present
Director, Multicultural Center, 2001- 2002
Director, Summer Humanities and Social Sciences Program, 2000 – 2007. Faculty member in the Program, 2011-