Helmut Puff

Helmut Puff's teaching and research focus on German literature, history, and culture in the late medieval and early modern period. He specializes in gender studies, the history of sexuality, media history, the history of reading, and the literature of the Reformation and the Renaissance. Recently, Helmut Puff has moved on to research modes of seeing and visual culture in early modern 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 research the changing representations of ruins as well as the history of three-dimensional city models from the sixteenth century to the present.

From 2002 until 2005, Helmut Puff served as the North American co-editor of the journal Gender and History. Together with Nancy Hunt (History / IRWG) Helmut Puff directed a program entitled "Global Turns and Gender Returns"--an initiative to promote new transcultural intellectual alliances and conversations among gender scholars based in manifold locations throughout the world. Helmut Puff was elected to a five-year term on the MLA's Divisional Committee on German Literature prior to 1700. In 2011-12, he directs Academic Year in Freiburg, an exchange program of four mid-Western universities, one of them University of Michigan, with Albert-Ludwigs-Universität in Freiburg, Germany www.ayf.uni-freiburg.de.

Selected Publications:

Books

• (2014) Miniature Monuments: Modeling German History
• (2012) After the History of Sexuality: German Genealogies with and Beyond Foucault
• (2003) Sodomy in Reformation Germany and Switzerland, 1400-1600
• (1995) Von dem schlüssel aller Künsten / nemblich der Grammatica": Deutsch im lateinischen Grammatikunterricht

Book Chapters

• (2013) Same-Sex Possibilities, The Oxford Handbook of Women and Gender in Medieval Europe
• (2012) After the History of (Male) Homosexuality, After the History of Sexuality: German Genealogies with and Beyond Foucault
• (2010) Memento Mori, Memento Mei: Albrecht Dürer and the Art of Dying, Enduring Loss in Early Modern Germany: Cross Disciplinary Perspectives
• (2010) Ruins as Models, Displaying Destruction in Postwar Germany

Affiliation(s)

• Germanic Languages and Literatures
• Women's and Gender Studies
• History
• History of Art
• WCED

Field(s) of Study

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