Overview
Personal
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Bildhauer, Bettina
Lecturer |
Contact details
Address: School of Modern Languages, University of St Andrews, Buchanan Building, Union Street, St Andrews, Fife, KY16 9PH
Telephone: +44 1334 463663
E-mail: bmeb@st-andrews.ac.uk
Research overview
Keywords: Areas of expertise: medieval German literature and culture, German cinema, medievalism/reception of the Middle Ages, medieval medicine, mysticism, literary and film theory, gender and queer studies. Topics: the body, monstrosity, blood, revenge, violence, time, periodization, historiography.
My research focuses on the German literature of the Middle Ages in its cultural context, and on its modern perceptions. My approach combines close textual analysis with recent theoretical ideas, in particular on bodies, gender and history.
My current research analyses the way in which the Middle Ages are represented in German cinema, bringing together medievalist, Germanist and filmic approaches for the first time to analyse German cinema's relation to its distant past. My co-edited collection Medieval Film was published in 2009, and I am at the Freie Universitaet Berlin on an Alexander von Humboldt grant for the academic year 2009/10 to complete my monograph A Medieval History of Film.
Another research interest of mine are the limits of the human - both of individual human beings and of what counts as human. My monograph Medieval Blood, loosely based on my PhD thesis, is concerned with blood as a crucial part of conceptualizations of the body, gender and subjectivity. I am particularly interested in the connections between medical, religious and literary ideas about blood, and in the anxieties expressed through the medieval obsession with blood, and continue to publish in this area.
In addition, I have studied how humans are distinguished from other beings, especially monsters. My co-edited collection The Monstrous Middle Ages is part of this work.
For my work in these three areas, I was recently awarded a Philip Leverhulme Prize for 'outstanding young scholars who have made a substantial and recognised contribution to their particular field of study'.
I am very keen to supervise doctoral dissertations on medieval German culture or on German film, especially those related to any of these topics.
Recent publications
2009; B Bildhauer; "Forward into the past: film theory's foundation in medievalism"; Medieval Film; Anke Bernau, B Bildhauer (ed); Manchester University Press, Manchester, UK; 40-59
2009; B Bildhauer, Anke Bernau; "Introduction: The a-chronology of medieval film"; Medieval Film; Anke Bernau, B Bildhauer (ed); Manchester University Press, Manchester, UK; 1-19
2009; A Bernau, BME Bildhauer; "Medieval Film"; Manchester University Press, Manchester, UK; 241
2009; B Bildhauer; "Medieval blood (paperback edition)"; University of Wales Press, Cardiff, UK; 245
2008; Bettina Bildhauer; "Das Mittelalter als Innenraum - Kosmos, Kathedrale, Kino"; Innenräume in der Literatur des deutschen Mittelalters : XIX. Anglo-German colloquium, Oxford 2005; Burkhard Hasebrink, Hans-Jochen Schiewer, Almut Suerbaum, Annette Volfing (ed); Niemeyer, Tuebingen; 409-426