Dr. Brandt earned her Master’s degrees in French and German from the University of Utrecht and a PhD from Harvard University in Comparative Literature. Her research and teaching interests include twentieth and twenty-first century transnational literature; literature and theories of the avant-garde(s); the literatures of migration; literary multilingualism and translation studies; German-Jewish literature and the Holocaust; theater and performance studies, including puppets; Asian-German Studies and early modern global relations. 

Brandt is currently working on two book-length manuscripts: Cutting Out: Radical Characters on the Move (about the writings of Yoko Tawada, Herta Müller and Emine Sevgi Özdamar and their strategic relationship to various avant-gardes and neo-avant-gardes) and With Love from Vienna: Austrian Holocaust Refugees and the Fate of their Elderly in Nazi Europe.

Before coming to Penn State, she taught as an assistant professor at MIT, Columbia University and Montclair State University.

Recent Courses:

• Ger 440 Die Stadt Wien im 20. Jahrhundert

• Ger 540 Jewish Vienna

• Ger 572 Performing Nation and Translation
• Ger 510 Introduction to Literary Theory and German Studies

Recent Publications:

• “Asia, Fantasia, Germasia,” Forum: Asian-German Studies, The German Quarterly 93.1. (Winter 2020)

• “Taming Foreign Speech: Language Politics in Shadow Plays around 1800,” The German Studies Review, (2018).2, 355-372 (Won the Essay Prize from the Goethe Society of North America, 2019)

• The Politics of the Archive. Eds. Bettina Brandt and Valentina Glajar. (Seminar: A Journal of Germanic Studies, 53.3, special issue, September 2017)

• “Yoko Tawada’s ‘Tongue Dance’ or the Failed Domestication of a Tongue in Furs” Un/Translateables. New Maps for Germanic Literatures. Eds. Bethany Wiggin and Catriona Macleod, (Northwestern University Press, 2016), 299-312.

• “Emine Sevgi Özdamar als Theaterautorin: eine Vorstudie zu „Karagöz in Alamania” Text und  Kritik. Zeitschrift für Literatur. 211 (2016), 26-36.

• China in the German Enlightenment. Eds. Bettina Brandt and Daniel Purdy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016)

• “The Bones of Translation: Tawada’s Translational Poetics” Beyond the Myth of Monolingualism, Eds. Liesbeth Minnaards and Tim Dembeck, (Amsterdam: Rodopi, Series Thamyris/Intersecting: Place, Sex and Race, 2014)

• Herta Müller. Politics and Aesthetics. Eds. Bettina Brandt and Valentina Glajar (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2013)