Dr. Anna Parkinson

Professional Background

Dr. Anna Parkinson is an associate professor of German at Northwestern University, Illinois. She received her PhD in German Studies from Cornell University in 2007. A native English speaker, Professor Parkinson also possesses language skills in German, French, and basic Afrikaans. While in residence at the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, Professor Parkinson conducted research on her project, “In the Final Analysis: Hans Keilson's Fiction, Psychoanalysis, and the Long Twentieth Century”.

Dr. Parkinson published her first monograph, An Emotional State: The Politics of Emotion in Postwar West German Culture, in 2015 as part of the larger series “Social History, Popular Culture, and Politics in Germany” (University of Michigan Press, 2015). She is also the author of a number of articles, including: “Adorno on the Airwaves: Feeling Reason, Educating Emotions,” in German Politics and Society, Special Issue on Radio and the Cold War, 32 no. 1 (Spring 2014); “The Death of the Adversary: Enduring Ambivalence in Hans Keilson’s Postwar Psychoanalytic Literature.” in 'Die vergangene Zeit bleibt die erlittene Zeit.' Untersuchungen zum Werk von Hans Keilson (Königshausen & Neumann, 2013); “Aptitudes of Feeling: Ekphrasis as Prosthetic Mourning in Anne Duden’s Das Judasschaf,” in New German Critique, Special Issue on Sites of Ambivalent Memory in Postwar Germany (2011).  Recently, Professor Parkinson has presented “In der Fremde zu hause: Contingent Cosmopolitanism and Elective Exile in the Writing of Hans Keilson” at the conference Spiritual Homeland—Wahlheimat-Elective Exiles co-organized by the University of Virginia and the Daat Hamakom-Center for the Study of Jewish Modernity, The Hebrew University, at the University of Virginia in October 2015, and “Democratic Sentiments vs. Communities of Ressentiment in Postwar West Germany” at the Department of German at Stanford University in March 2014.

Fellowship Research

For her Leon Milman Memorial Fellowship at the Mandel Center, Professor Parkinson evaluated the status of Enlightenment principles of humanism after the long twentieth century through the prism of the life and work of Jewish-German modernist author and psychoanalyst Hans Keilson. The overarching premise of this project was that Keilson's unusual and extensive literary and psychoanalytic engagement challenges and revises precepts of Enlightenment humanism that overtly structured his approach to the world, even as these ideas were corroded through widespread, radical doubt during Nazi occupation and in the post-Auschwitz context.

Dr. Anna Parkinson was in residence at the Mandel Center from February 1 to May 31, 2016.