Professor, German and Film, Television, and Media
About
Prof. von Moltke's research and teaching centers on Film and German Cultural History of the 20th and 21st centuries. He studied in Germany, France, and the US, and has previously taught at the University of Hildesheim in Germany. He is the author of No Place Like Home: Locations of Heimat in German Cinema, winner of the MLA Scaglione Prize for Best Book in German Studies. Combining his interests in German, Film, and Cultural Studies, he has published widely on issues in German Cinema, Critical Theory, and 20th-century German culture. Articles on the work of Alexander Kluge, the role of melodrama and affect in recent historical “event television,” on New German Cinema, the phenomenon of stardom in Germany and Hollywood, representations of Jewishness, the culture of Americanization, and popular culture in postwar Germany, and more have appeared, among others, in New German Critique, Screen, Cinema Journal, Germanic Review as well as in numerous edited volumes in the U.S. and Germany. Together with Julia Hell and Andreas Gailus, Johannes von Moltke currently serves as executive editor for The Germanic Review, and together with Gerd Gemünden he is the series editor for Screen Cultures: German Film and the Visual at Camden House. He is the organizer of the German Film Institute, a biannual event hosted by the University of Michigan and directed by Anton Kaes (Berkeley) and Eric Rentschler (Harvard). Prof. von Moltke was recently elected to the Board of the German Studies Association.
In addition to his work on a monograph that considers Siegfried Kracauer's role as a cultural theorist at the intersection of the Frankfurt School and the New York Intellectuals, Prof. von Moltke is also editing two volumes of essays by and about Siegfried Kracauer, respectively: together with Gerd Gemünden (Dartmouth College), he has assembled an interdisciplinary anthology of essays entitled Culture in the Anteroom: The Legacies of Siegfried Kracauer, to be published by University of Michigan Press; and together with Kristy Rawson, Ph.D. candidate in Screen Arts & Cultures at the University of Michigan, he is editing a collection Kracauer’s writings during his American exile. Entitled Affinities: Siegfried Kracauer’s American Writings 1941-1966, this volume is to be published by the University of California Press.
Professor von Moltke’s past courses and future teaching interests include Film Analysis, Film Theory, German Film History, Fascist Cinema, New German Cinema, Siegfried Kracauer, Critical Theory, Melodrama and Affect.
Fields of Study: 20th- and 21st-century film, literature, and culture; Critical Theory; film theory; German film history.