Rate My Professor Astrid Oesmann

Astrid Oesmann is an Associate Professor in the Department of Modern and Classical Languages, Literatures and Cultures at Rice University. She serves as Program Advisor for German Studies and is a faculty affiliate of the Program in Jewish Studies. Oesmann studied German Literature and Literary Theory at the Universität Hamburg in Germany, The Johns Hopkins University, and Columbia University, where she earned her PhD. Prior to her appointment at Rice, she held a position as Assistant Professor at the University of Iowa.

Her research examines how historical trauma and radical political change are represented in literature, performance, film, and art. Key areas include 20th-Century Literature and Theater, Critical Theory, Aesthetics, and Philosophy of History. As a scholar of Bertolt Brecht, she is completing a book-length study, Masks, Politics, and the European Avant-garde, on the use of masks in avant-garde theater amid historical and social crises during and after World War I. Another project investigates Holocaust memory formation and its influence on the philosophical writings of Theodor W. Adorno and Siegfried Kracauer, including shifts in the perception of tragedy informed by her prior work on Adorno and Brecht. Oesmann serves on the editorial board of the Brecht Yearbook. Her publications include the monograph Staging History: Brecht’s Social Concepts of Ideology (SUNY Press, 2005) and, co-edited with Matthias Rothe, Brecht und das Fragment (Verbrecher Verlag, 2020). Selected articles are “From Aesthetics to History: Brecht’s Encounter with Mei Lan-fang and Gestural Theatre,” The Brecht Yearbook 45 (2020); “Inherent Estrangement: Brecht’s Reading of Shakespeare’s Tragedies,” The Brecht Yearbook 42 (2017); “Tragedy Out of Joint: Bertolt Brecht’s and Heiner Müller’s Interaction with a Genre,” The Brecht Yearbook 39 (2015); and “Sebald’s Melancholic Method: Writing as Ethical Memory in Austerlitz,” Monatshefte 106 (2014). She teaches courses including GERM 410 The Politics of German Film, GERM 320 20th-Century German Thought, GERM 301 Third Year German I, and FWIS 124 Witnessing the Holocaust.