Jennifer Creech
Assistant Professor of German
PhD University of Minnesota—Twin Cities
Post-1945 German studies; film studies; gender studies; cultural studies
(585) 275-4273
428 Lattimore Hall
Research/Writing interests
Creech is currently revising a manuscript for publication, entitled Mothers, Comrades and Outcasts: East German Women’s Films 1965 and Beyond, which addresses political filmmaking in the former East Germany from the period of the “freeze” (1965) to the fall of the Wall (1989). At a time when the East German film studios (DEFA) suffered from strict political and aesthetic censorship, filmmakers retreated from narratives of overt political critique into the safety of domestic narratives. Creech’s work considers the location of DEFA’s so-called “women’s films” within the context of the freeze, suggesting that during these decades in particular, representations of personal desire and disappointment were used strategically to assert a more covert political critique of real existing socialism. Her work draws on feminist theories of the private/public divide, the male gaze, the female voice and maternal desire to illustrate how these films negotiated viewer needs and desires, state expectations and censorship, as well as artistic goals of creating a critical socialist cinema.
Selected publications
- “A Few Good Men: Gender, Ideology and Narrative Politics in The Lives of Others and Good Bye, Lenin!” Women in German Yearbook 25 (2009): 100-26.
Invited presentations (selection)
- “Mad Men and Alpha Wives: Feminism in ‘Post-Feminist’ Culture.” Keynote Address, Susan B. Anthony Institute for Women’s Studies Undergraduate Conference, March 2010.
- “‘Documenting’ Women’s History: Helke Misselwitz’s Winter adé.” German Studies Association Conference, Washington D.C., October 2009.
- “The Most Important Art? Lenin and Post-Wende German Film.” Got Art? Intersections of Art and Politics in German Culture, DAAD Weekend, Cornell University, September 2008.
Recent courses
- Cinema and Revolution: The West German Avant-Garde
- Gender & Sexuality in the 20th Century
- Introduction to the Art of Film
- Marx & Marxism
- Men of Marble, Women of Steel: Introduction to East European Cinema
- Mothers, Comrades and Whores: Women in Post-War German Cinema