Julia Hell

Julia Hell studied in France, Germany, and the U.S. After receiving her Ph.D. in 1989 with a dissertation on the historical novel, she taught at Duke University from 1989 to 1997 in the Department of German and the Program in Literature. In 1998, she received the MLA’s Scaglione Prize for her Post-Fascist Fantasies: Psychoanalysis, History, and the Literature of East Germany (Duke UP, 1997). For selected parts of the text, see the following pdf documents: Contents, Introduction, History as Trauma. Interested in the politics of culture, Hell has published extensively on the topic of post-fascist East and West German literature and visual arts, and German culture after 1989 (with articles on Uwe Johnson, W. G. Sebald, Neo Rauch, Anselm Kiefer, Uwe Tellkamp; Janina Bauman, Heiner Müller, Peter Weiss; for more see list of publications below). Hell also contributed entries on East German literature to The New History of German Literature (Harvard UP, 2004).

Hell subsequently pursued this interest in the intersection of politics and the arts in the field of ruin studies, organizing a conference (2005), followed by the publication of Ruins of Modernity (Duke UP, 2010). She contributed an essay on the ruins of the Third Reich (“Imperial Ruin Gazers, or Why did Scipio Weep?”), and co-authored the introduction with Andreas Schönle (Slavic Studies; University of London).  For more information, click here. Hell and also published a special issue on ruin studies (for her introduction, see “Las Vegas/Detroit: Endings and New Beginnings.” The Germanic Review, vol. 86, no. 4 (Winter 2011): 225 – 231). Dealing with the connection between the phenomenology of ruins and the epistemology of realism after 1945, Hell’s original contribution to the ruins conference appeared in John Zilcosky’s Writing Travel under the title “Ruins Travel: Orphic Journeys Through 1940s Germany.”

In her recent scholarship, Hell has moved beyond national and chronological boundaries. Her new book, The Conquest of Ruins: The Third Reich and the Fall of Rome, is forthcoming with the University of Chicago Press in the fall of 2018. Combining imperium studies with ruin studies, the book reconstructs the long history of European imperialism around the problematic of post-Roman mimesis and the specter of Rome’s fall. The Conquest of Ruins traces the obsessive production of what Hell calls scopic scenarios of imperial ruin gazing that visualize imperial time and power relations. Starting with Polybios’ Histories about the Punic Wars and rise of the Roman Empire, the book ends with Martin Heidegger’s critique of the Nazi empire’s imitation of Rome and Anselm Kiefer’s Zersetzungen/dis-articulations of the scopic scenario and its matrix of subject positions. The book’s analytical narrative is informed by political theory, in particular the work of Hannah Arendt and Carl Schmitt. Hell’s previous work on Schmitt’s concept of the katechontic sovereign (see below), addressing the topic of post-Roman mimesis in the context of the Nazi empire, is now part of chapter 25 of The Conquest of Ruins.

Hell’s recent articles explore the nexus of empire and ruins in a contemporary setting (see “Ruinopolis: Post-Imperial Theory and Learning from Las Vegas.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 38.3 (April 2014): 1047 – 1068; German Studies and Sociology). In “Demolition Artists: Icono-Graphy, Tanks, and Scenarios of (Post-) Communist Subjectivity in Works by Neo Rauch, Heiner Müller, Durs Grünbein, and Uwe Tellkamp” (The Germanic Review. 89.2 (2014): 131-170) Hell proposes a post-imperial approach to the study of East German culture.

Hell was a fellow at the Institute for the Humanities in 2010-2011. She is currently a visitor at the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton, NJ) where she is working on a new book project by writing a chapter on the ethics and aesthetics of scenes of execution in Peter Weiss’ s epic novel, The Aesthetics of Resistance and Gerhard Richter’s so-called RAF cycle of photopaintings.

A former co-editor of The Germanic Review Hell served on the editorial and advisory board of PMLA and The German Quarterly and currently serves on the advisory board of Signale: Modern German Letters, Culture, and Thought (electronic book series at Cornell UP), and the e-journal Konturen: Interdisciplinary Journal for German Cultural Analysis.

On the undergraduate level Professor Hell’s courses included: The Third Reich and its Legacies; Introduction to German Literature: The Family; Twentieth Century German Philosophy. On the graduate level: Realism: Theory and Aesthetics; German Colonialism (with George Steinmetz); Hauntings: A Seminar in Psychoanalysis; Trauma and Cultural Analysis (with James Porter); Post-Fascist Cultures; Ruins (with Andreas Schönle); Political Theory: From Weber to Schmitt (with George Steinmetz).    

Affiliation(s)

• Faculty Affiliate, Center for European Studies-European Union Center

Award(s)

• Institute for Advanced Study, visitor (2017-2018)
  
• Awards Helmut Stern Research Professor Fellowship, Institute for the Humanities, University of Michigan (2010-2011)
• Grant to teach NEH Summer Seminar, “The Culture of Terror: Revisiting Hannah Arendt’s
• Grant to teach Rackham Interdisciplinary Seminar, “Ruins of Modernity” (Fall 2004)
• ACLS Fellowship (2003-2004)
• LS&A Excellence in Research Award, University of Michigan (1999)
• Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Best Book in Germanic Languages and Literature (1998)

Field(s) of Study

• Modern German Culture, Literature, Visual Arts
• Ruin Studies
• Imperium Studies
• Intellectual History and Political Theory
• Psychoanalysis and Feminist Theory
• History of the Novel/Modernism/Realism