Rate My Professor Olivia Landry

Olivia Landry, Ph.D., serves as Associate Professor of German and Chair of the Department of Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies at Virginia Commonwealth University. She completed her Ph.D. at Indiana University in 2014. Landry's academic career includes a Kenneth P. Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Pittsburgh from 2014 to 2016, a one-year appointment as William H. Bonsall Acting Assistant Professor of German at Stanford University, and a position as Assistant Professor at Lehigh University from 2017 to 2022. Her research has been supported by grants from SSHRC, DAAD, and the Humboldt Foundation.

Landry's scholarship centers on film and media studies as well as theater and performance studies within German and European contexts. Her work examines the Berlin School cinema through recalibrations of body, movement, and spectatorship; radical transnational theater in Berlin addressing anger and social injustice; documentary films that disrupt colonial ethnographic conventions of listening and recording; and a new cinema of maternity highlighting negative affects and the burdens of motherhood, as explored in her recent book Cinema of Crushing Motherhood: A New Feminist Cinema, which analyzes 21st-century films portraying mothers burdened by expectations. She is the author of four monographs: Movement and Performance in Berlin School Cinema (Indiana University Press, 2018), Theatre of Anger: Radical Transnational Performance in Contemporary Berlin (University of Toronto Press, 2020), A Decolonizing Ear: Documentary Film Disrupts the Archive (University of Toronto Press, 2022), and Cinema of Crushing Motherhood: A New Feminist Cinema (Camden House, 2024), with a forthcoming book from University of Illinois Press (2025). Landry has published numerous peer-reviewed articles in leading journals such as New German Critique, German Studies Review, Modern Drama, and Feminist Media Studies, including "Jewish Revenge on the German Screen" (2025), "Motherhood that Is Einfach anders" (2025), and "A Cancelled Lesson in Plurality: Hannah Arendt and The Situation" (2025). She contributes to edited volumes and serves on the Faculty Advisory Board of VCU's Humanities Research Center.