Bio
Elizabeth Otto
Assistant Professor
Professor Otto teaches courses on European and American art and visual culture from the nineteenth-century to the present, issues of gender and theory, and the history of photography.
Education and Training
Ph.D., the History of Art and Graduate Certificate in Women’s Studies, the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
M.A., Art History, Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada
B.A. Art History (English minor), Oberlin College, Oberlin, Ohio
Research Interests
Otto’s current research focuses on masculinity and the political, cultural and gendered valences of represented bodily fragmentation in multiple media of later nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Germany. Other research interests include the relationship between popular visual cultures and Modernism, the visual representation of New Womanhood as a trans-national phenomenon, gendered neoclassicism and French Cubism, and the intersection of film and photographic technologies.
Selected Publications
Books:
The New Woman International: Representations in Photography and Film, 1890s-1930s. Forthcoming with the University of Michigan Press, 2010; co-edited with Vanessa Rocco, with a foreword by Linda Nochlin.
Tempo, Tempo! The Bauhaus Photomontages of Marianne Brandt. Berlin: the Bauhaus-Archiv and Jovis Verlag, 2005.
Articles:
Schaulust: Sexuality and Trauma in Conrad Veidt’s Masculine Masquerades.” The Many Faces of Weimar German Cinema. Ed. Christian Rogowski. Suffolk, U.K.: Camden House, forthcoming: 2010.
“Playtime in Dessau: Bauhaus Photomontage and New Visions of Masculinity.” Bauhaus Palimpsest: the Object of Discourse. Eds. Robin Schuldenfrei and Jeffrey Saletnik. New York: Routledge, forthcoming: 2009.
“A ‘Schooling of the Senses’: Post-Dada Visual Experiments in the Bauhaus Photomontages of László Moholy-Nagy and Marianne Brandt.” New German Critique, forthcoming: 2009.
“‘With All Ten Fingers’: Marianne Brandt and Gender at the Bauhaus,” Model Bauhaus. Munich: Prestel Verlag / Bauhaus-Archiv, Bauhaus Dessau, Weimar Bauhaus, 2009.
“The Secret History of Photomontage: Fragmentary Soldier Portraits from the Later Nineteenth Century through the Weimar Republic.” Weimar Publics – Weimar Subjects. Eds. Kerstin Barndt, Kathleen Canning and Kristin McGuire. Oxford: Berghahn Books, forthcoming, 2008.
“Uniform: On Constructions of Soldierly Masculinity in Early Twentieth-Century Visual Culture.”Kunst, Geschlecht, Politik. Männlichkeitskonstruktionen in der Moderne. Ed. Martina Kessel. Böhlau Verlag, 2004.
“Memories of Bilitis: Marie Laurencin beyond the Cubist Context.” Genders 36 (Fall 2002).
Selected Curatorial Experience
Tempo, Tempo! The Bauhaus Photomontages of Marianne Brandt, the first exhibition of Marianne Brandt’s work in montage, was curated by Otto and shown at the Bauhaus-Archiv in Berlin, Harvard’s Busch-Reisinger Museum, and the International Center of Photography in New York.
Prizes, Awards and Grants
Otto is the recipient of numerous grants and fellowships, including
a German Chancellor Award from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, an American Fellowship from the American Association
of University Women, the Berlin Program for Advanced German and European
Studies, and a Deutscher Akademischer Austausch Dienst Fellowship. She is
currently a Faculty Fellow of UB’s Humanities Institute.
