Sophie Schweiger

Sophie Johanna Schweiger joins the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures as Assistant Professor. She finished her Ph.D. at Columbia University with a dissertation on the role of gestures in literature, film, and performance (2021). She worked one year as a Visiting Assistant Professor at Colgate University (2021-2022). Before that, she studied at the Universities of Vienna and Lisbon, and spent one year as a Fulbright Teaching Assistant at Rutgers University.

Sophie’s research focuses on theatre, drama theory and the study of performance; intertextuality and inter-mediality, including intermedial quotation practices; Vienna 1900 and the performance of gender; as well as (post-)apocalyptical narratives and committed literature. She has recently published on Arthur Schnitzler, “Corseted Choristry. Arthur Schnitzler’s Reigen as Chor(e)ography,” German Quarterly (2021), and on emoji and Black Lives Matter: “Digital Schreibzeug & Emoji Activism,” Germanic Review (forthcoming). She also contributed to the Lexicon of Global Melodrama (ed. by Heike Paul, et. al.) with an entry on G.W. Pabst’s Pandora’s Box. Currently, she is working on several projects, including her first book in which she uses gestures to study trans-mediality and media difference.