Rate My Professor Sylvia Schmitz-Burgard

Sylvia Schmitz-Burgard is an Associate Professor in the Department of World Languages, Literatures & Cultures at the College of the Holy Cross, where she is affiliated with the German Studies program. She earned her Ph.D. from the University of Virginia. Her research interests focus on literary, psychoanalytic, legal, and feminist issues in 20th-, 19th-, and 18th-century German literature and culture, Austrian cultural history, the 18th-century European novel, women writers, law and literature, and contemporary literary theory. Schmitz-Burgard teaches courses on German environmentalism, Vienna around 1900, Metropolis Berlin, and the Bauhaus. She has been a faculty member since at least 2005, initially as Assistant Professor, and actively mentors undergraduate students in honors theses and academic conferences.

Schmitz-Burgard has published two books and numerous articles. Her first book, Das Schreiben des anderen Geschlechts (Königshausen & Neumann, 2000), is a comparative study of the creation and creativity of female writing figures in key 18th-century narrative texts. It examines writing and reading according to gender, narrative inscription of the body, and the entanglement of desire for and repression of the other in Richardson's Pamela novels, Rousseau's Julie and Émile, and Goethe's three Wilhelm Meister novels. Her second book, Gewaltiges Schreiben gegen Gewalt (Königshausen und Neumann, Würzburg, 2011), is an interdisciplinary study of law, ethics, and literature investigating the evolution of feminine ethics in works by women authors, framed by the Prussian Allgemeines Landrecht of 1794 and its 19th-century revisions, as well as post-WWII reforms to family and marriage laws in the German civil code. Additional publications include "Psychoanalyse eines Mythos: Nachdenken über Christa T.," Monatshefte 79 (1987): 463-77; "Normative Gender Discourse: Laplanche vs. Freud's Critics," in Fictions of Culture (1991), 247-72; "Body Language as Expression of Repression: Lethal Reverberations of Fascism in Die Ausgesperrten," in Framed by Language (1994), 194-228; "‘Spieglein, Spieglein an der Wand, wer ist Subjekt in diesem Land?’: Spektakuläre Spekulationen schreibender Frauen," in Bodies, Discourses, Practices (2003); "Überhörtes Leid: Ungeahndete Verbrechen in Annette von Droste-Hülshoff’s Die Judenbuche," Droste-Hülshoff Yearbook 8 (2011), 63-104; and "Fashioning Mind or Body: Women’s Choices in 1736. Luise Adelgunde Victorie Gottsched’s Life in View of Die Pietisterey im Fischbeinrocke, oder die Doctormäßige Frau," Daphnis 42 (2013), 237-263.