Home > About Us > People : Ruth-Ellen B Joeres
Department Affiliations
Narrative
"My abiding interest in gender and class and other analytical categories makes an enormous difference in how I read and think about and teach a text. But there is also my fascination for personal narrative forms like autobiographies, biographies, and essays - which has led to my abandoning academic prose and trying to construct a volume of essays, an exciting, albeit daunting task, this engaging in the very work of creative writing that I have studied and taught all these years. My teaching and my research have always been closely linked. Now they seem to be on top of each other, theory and practice all mixed together."
Ruth-Ellen Joeres's scholarly work - ranging across the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries - has focused above all on women writers, interdisciplinary inquiries, and feminist theorizing. She coedited Signs from 1990-1995 and Women in German Yearbook from 2001-2004.
Specialties
- Feminism and gender studies
- • 18th- to 20th-century German literature, cultural studies
Educational Background
- Ph.D.: Johns-Hopkins University.
Publications
- "Scattered Thoughts on Current Feminist Literary Critical Work in Nineteenth-Century German Studies." Women in German Yearbook 17 (2001): 225-44.
- Respectability and Deviance: Nineteenth-Century German Women Writers and the Ambiguity of Representation. Joeres, Ruth-Ellen B, University of Chicago Press, 1998.
- The German Enlightenment (1720-1790). Joeres, Ruth-Ellen B, 1997.
- The Politics of the Essay: Feminist Perspectives. Ed. with Elizabeth Mittman. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1993.
- "'Language Is Also a Place of Struggle': The Language of Feminism and the Language of American Germanistik." Women in German Yearbook 8 (1993): 247-57.
- German Women in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries: A Social and Literary History. Eds. Ruth-Ellen Joeres and M. J. Maynes. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1986.
- Die Anfänge der deutschen Frauenbewegung: Louise Otto-Peters. Frankfurt/M: Fischer, 1983
Awards
- University of Minnesota's Distinguished Women Scholars Award in the Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences, 2004
- College of Liberal Arts Scholars of the College, University of Minnesota, 1999
- McKnight Research Award
Courses Taught
- Class, Gender, and Sexual Politics in 18th-Century Germany
- Feminist Theory and Cultural Studies
- Interdisciplinary collaborative seminar: Gender, Genre, and Political Transformation in Germany and the Transatlantic World, 1776-1989
- Goethe, Faust, and the Canon
- Women and Madness: Representations, Differences, Resistances
- National Identity, Gender, and Class in 19th-Century German Prose Writings
- Intellectual History of Feminism
Alternative Output Formats