German Faculty at Holy Cross

Anna E. Baker received her under graduate degree from UC Berkeley with a degree in German after completing an honors thesis about Friedrich Hölderlin and the creation of a Poetic Priesthood. She graduated in 2008 from the University of Virginia after completing her disseration, The Aesthetics of Ugliness. She has studied abroad at the Universität Bayreuth, Georg-August Universität in Goettingen and the Universität Heidelberg. In 2004-05, she taught literary theory courses at the Universität Mannheim. She was co-director of the 2003 Graduate Conference Verwandlung: Transformation in German History and Literature as well as the 2004 Graduate Conferene Death and Seduction. More recently, Professor Baker has organized conference panels for the American Comparative Literature Association: The Interstices of Life and Death (2008) and Global Conceptions of the Body (2009). While her interests span far too many centuries - from Lessing, Hölderlin, Schiller to Kafka, Arthur Schnitzler and Elfriede Jelinek - her focus remains 18th and 19th century literature. Her current scholarship examines works from Lessing, Schiller, and Raabe as well as Keller.