About Me

Martina Kolb holds a Ph.D. in comparative literature from Yale and is associate professor of German and associate director of the Honors Program at Susquehanna University. She has taught languages, literatures, arts, cultures, and core humanities at Tübingen (Germany), Oregon, Yale, Konstanz (Germany), Bilkent (Turkey), Penn State and Susquehanna universities.

Specializing in European modernism and the inter-arts, she has not only taught internationally, but has also researched across disciplines and been the recipient of numerous prestigious academic fellowships, including a Giles Whiting Dissertation Prize Fellowship, Postdoctoral Fellowships at the Universities of Konstanz and Bologna, Suhrkamp and Beinecke Archival Fellowships at Marbach and Yale, a Miller Fellowship in Exile Studies at the University of London, and Academic Fellowships with the American Psychoanalytic Association in New York and the Psychoanalytic Center of Philadelphia. Researching at the interdisciplinary intersection of the medical humanities, aesthetics, and comparative literature, Kolb has been engaged in continuing education in psychoanalytic theory.

Primarily against the theoretical backgrounds of geo-poetics on the one hand, and psycho-poetics on the other, Kolb’s publications have addressed a wide spectrum of linguistic, literary, artistic and cultural materials and concerns, ranging from medieval poetry to contemporary film, Renaissance painting to Fascist aesthetics, botanic agency to last rites, mourning to theatrical masks, transference to detective fiction, theories of trauma to concepts of world literature, and from Mediterranean studies to prison writing. She has also translated extensive interviews with Holocaust survivors for the International Slave and Forced Laborers Interrogation Project.

Her monograph Nietzsche, Freud, Benn, and the Azure Spell of Liguria (University of Toronto Press 2013) reassesses comparative modernism, relies on Nietzsche’s belief in the cathartic dimension of poetic expression, presents a discussion of places, displacements and vernaculars as foundational for the poetic tradition, and concentrates on literary influence, intellectual nomadism and the fundamentally poetic relationship of body and mind. This “fascinating study” comes “highly recommended” by reviewers, who have praised it for its “meticulous scholarship” and have characterized it as “expertly competent.”

• ‘Immerhin Brecht’: Literacy and Theatricality in Das Leben Der Anderen
• Grave Action: Last Rites in Brecht’s Mother Courage and Beckett’s Endgame
• Clouds of Knowing, Songs of Experience, Seasons of Love: Bertolt Brecht’s Intimations of Dante and Haiku

Courses Taught