Sabine Hake
Professor — Ph.D., University of Hannover, Germany
Professor, Texas Chair of German Literature and Culture

Contact
- E-mail: hake@austin.utexas.edu
- Phone: 232-6379
- Office: BUR 332
- Campus Mail Code: C3300
Interests
Late-nineteenth and twentieth century German culture, German film and media, art and politics, fascist aesthetic, the modern metropolis, cultural theory
Biography
Sabine Hake is Professor and Texas Chair of German Literature and Culture in the Department of Germanic Studies at The University of Texas at Austin where she has been since 2004; she previously taught at Bryn Mawr College and the University of Pittsburgh. A cultural historian working on nineteenth and twentieth century Germany, with a special emphasis on film, she is the author of six monographs, including German National Cinema (2008, second revised edition), Topographies of Class: Modern Architecture and Mass Society in Weimar Berlin (2008), and Screen Nazis: Cinema, History, and Democracy (2012). She has coedited four anthologies and published numerous articles on various aspects of German film and media, the culture of the Weimar Republic, and the dynamics of modernism, mass culture, and modernity. Since 2011, she serves as the editor of German Studies Review, the journal of the German Studies Association. Her research has been supported by fellowships from the National Endowment of the Humanities, the National Humanities Center, the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), the Fulbright Scholar Program, and the Rockefeller, J. Paul Getty, and Andrew W. Mellon Foundations. In 2015-16, she spent an academic year at the Freiburg Center for Advanced Studies (FRIAS) as a EURIAS and Marie Curie Senior Fellow of the European Union.
Current Research
Prof. Hake is currently working on two book projects. The first is an interdisciplinary three-volume study on the proletarian imaginary in German culture from the 1860s to the 1960s. Using proletarian identifications as a heuristic lens, the study is a contribution both to the complicated history of class and culture in modern Germany and to the ongoing theoretical debate on political emotions and the politics of emotion. The first volume, The Proletarian Dream: Socialism, Culture, and Emotion In Germany, 1863-1933, covers the emergence of working-class culture in Imperial Germany and the Weimar Republic and was published by De Gruyter in 2017. The second volume, which will be completed in 2011, is titled "The German Worker: Reimagining Class in the Third Reich." The third volume will trace postwar imaginaries of labor and industry in the German Democratic Republic and the Federal Republic. The goal throughout is not to establish a new working-class canon of writers, artists, and thinkers or add another category to the ever-expanding discursive terrain claimed by identity politics but to uncover the continuities between socialism, nationalism, fascism, and populism in the long history of modern mass mobilizations and do so through the social and political fantasies projected onto the figure of the worker and the myth of the working class.
The other book project, tentatively titled “German Cinema in the Age of Media Convergence,” is a continuation of Professor Hake’s extensive work on German film history.Conceived as a series of case studies, the book proposes to rewrite national cinema from the perspective of media convergence and, through its historical manifestations, to consider the theoretical implications for film history and media archeology (adaptation, intermediality, multimediality). Individual chapters deal with theater in early silent cinema, architecture in the expressionist film, the early sound film and recording industry, the West German revue film, the East German opera film, as well as chapters on the connections of film with radio and television and, closely related, the implications of convergence history for classical film theory and contemporary media theory.
For more information on Prof. Hake, see www.sabinehake.com