Alys George

Alys George’s research interests center on 19th- through 21st-century German and Austrian literature, cultural history, and visual culture, with a special emphasis on modernism and the postwar period. She works at the intersection of literary studies with such areas as the medical humanities and history of the body, film and photography, modern dance and performance cultures, print culture and periodical studies. Her current research projects explore Central European modernist literatures from a transnational perspective; literature of the Austrian occupation (1945–1955); and the history of women in interwar Vienna.

George is the author of The Naked Truth: Viennese Modernism and the Body (University of Chicago Press, 2020), which was awarded the German Studies Association’s DAAD/GSA Best Book Prize in Literature and Cultural Studies and was shortlisted for both the Laura Shannon Prize in Contemporary European Studies and the Waterloo Centre for German Studies Book Prize. The Naked Truth was an Amazon #1 new release and best seller in European Literature, Modernism Literary Criticism, and German Literary Criticism. In addition to numerous articles and book chapters, she published an annotated critical edition of letters between Hugo von Hofmannsthal and the American literary magazine The Dial. She is also the co-editor, together with Kristen Ann Ehrenberger (University of Pittsburgh), of a forthcoming special issue of Seminar: A Journal of Germanic Studies (University of Toronto Press) on “Medical(ized) Bodies in the German-Speaking World.”

Her research has been supported by the Fulbright Program, the Austrian Federal Ministry of Education, Science, and Research, the IFK Internationales Forschungszentrum Kulturwissenschaften/International Research Center for Cultural Studies, the Dietrich W. Botstiber Institute for Austrian-American Studies, the German Studies Association and Austrian Cultural Forum, the Freie Universität Berlin, and other institutions.

George’s excellence in graduate and undergraduate teaching has been recognized with Stanford University’s Centennial Teaching Award and New York University’s Golden Dozen Teaching Award.

Interests:

• 19th- through 21st-century German and Austrian literature, cultural history, and visual culture
• European modernisms
• fin-de-siècle Vienna
• medical humanities
• history of the body