Helmut Puff

Helmut Puff's teaching and research focus on German literature, history, and culture in the medieval and early modern periods. He specializes in gender studies, the history of sexuality, media history, and the literature of the Reformation and the Renaissance. His research includes modes of seeing and visual culture in sixteenth-century Europe with a focus on German Renaissance art, especially Albrecht Dürer. His interest in the intersections between textuality, visuality, and spatiality, has led him to publish on the changing representations of ruins as well as the history of three-dimensional city models from the sixteenth century to the present. Recently, he has started a new project on waiting as a mode of experienced temporality between the Middle Ages and the twentieth century.

Helmut Puff has been active on professional committees in the MLA, Sixteenth-Century Studies Association, the Renaissance Society of America, and Frühneuzeit Interdisziplinär (FNI).  He serves on the board of the journal Central European History and Social History, Popular Culture, and Politics in Germany, a book series with UM Press. In addition to two one-year terms as department chair, he directed Academic Year in Freiburg three times, an exchange program of four mid-Western universities, one of them University of Michigan, with Albert-Ludwigs-Universität in Freiburg, Germany (see www.ayf.uni-freiburg.de). Currently, he is the director of the Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies (EIHS). 

Click here for a completed publication listing [PDF]

Affiliation(s)

• Germanic Languages and Literatures
• History
• Women’s Studies
• History of Art

Field(s) of Study

• Late Medieval and Early Modern German Literature, Culture, and History
• European Reformations
• History of Sexuality, Gender History
• Visual Culture
• Media History