POWER

The Power of Life and Death

Prof. Elisabeth Bronfen
  Englisches Seminar,
  University of Zurich, Switzerland

Elisabeth Bronfen is a graduate of the University of Munich and currently holds the chair of English and American Studies at the University of Zurich . She has been a guest professor at Columbia University, Princeton University, Sheffield Hallam Univeristy, the University of Copenhagen and the University of Aarhus. While a specialist in 19th and 20th century literature, her articles range from work on gender studies, psychoanalysis, and film to cultural theory and art. Her publications include Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic (Manchester University Press, 1992) and the collection of essays entitled Death and Representation, co-edited with Sarah W. Goodwin (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993). Professor Bronfen has also published books on Hysteria, Sylvia Plath, and Dorothy Richardson; she has edited a four-volume German edition of the poetry and letters of Anne Sexton and co-edited a collection of essays on recent scholarship in gender studies (Feminist Consequences: Theory for the New Century, Columbia University Press, 2000). Her current research projects include a book on Divas and the culture of celebrity, a cultural history of the night, as well as work on gothic cinema and on the cultural reconsideration of the Fifties.