Research Interests:
Professor Karl's research and teaching focus on 20th-and 21st-century German and comparative literature, film and media studies, visual studies, postmigrant studies, aesthetics and politics, and theater and performance studies. Writing in German and English, she has published in American, German, and French contexts. At Rutgers, she is an affiliate member in the Program of Cinema Studies and European Studies. Professor Karl currently serves as the director of the Center for European Studies and runs the working group “The Cliché” at the Center for Cultural Analysis.
Her first book Manipulations: Hands at Work in European Modernism (DeGruyter, 2025) is conceived as an investigation of the surprisingly central role played by the hand in German and French literature and the visual arts in the modernist period. The study asks specifically how, in the wake of debates about artistic creation around 1900, the forging of new art forms, the development of new technologies, and the status of representational frameworks came to be focused around the hand. Related publications include an essay on hands and technology in Paul Valéry and Walter Benjamin, an essay on Robert Wiene's The Hands of Orlac (Cinéma & Cie, 2021), as well as an investigation into the role of the hand in Fritz Lang's Dr. Mabuse: The Gambler (Screen, 2023).
Currently, Professor Karl is at work on a second book-length project dealing with contemporary forms of realism. Tentatively entitled Rumors of Realism: The Return of a Popular Narrative Technique, the project explores the resurgence of realist storytelling in recent German-speaking literature, film, and theater, with a focus on (auto-)fictional accounts by postmigrant writers, filmmakers and playwrights such as Olivia Wenzel, Saša Stanišić, and Sasha Salzmann. . Instead of viewing these artistic forms solely through a representational lens, the project seeks to demonstrate how contemporary storytelling is deeply informed by both realism and formalism. Here, Professor Karl focuses on moments that she calls “transistors,” a portmanteau of transfer and resistor. Going beyond the conventional understanding of the transistor as a built-in resistance in an electrical current, the term describes an auto-resistant mode of narrative transfer, triggered by the appearance of technical objects and devices. Her article “Auto-Fiktion. Zur Konjunktur des Ich in der Gegenwartsliteratur“ (Zeitschrift für Deutsche Philologie, May 2025) focuses on autofictional works by postmigrant authors Olivia Wenzel and Sharon Dodua Otoo; another deals with the French port city of Marseille and the pivotal role it plays in works by László Moholy-Nagy, Siegfried Kracauer, Anna Seghers, and Christian Petzold (Jahrbuch für Exilforschung, 2024).
Honors and Awards:
2023 Alfried Krupp Junior Fellowship
Alfried Krupp Kolleg, Greifswald
2021 & 2022 Thyssen @ KWI International Fellowship
KWI (Center for Advanced Studies), Essen
2021-2022 Rutgers Global International Collaborative Research Grant
Project Title “Visions of Europe. Cinema and Migration in Contemporary Germany”
2022 Rutgers Humanities Plus Pedagogical Initiative Grant
2018-2019 Research Grant, DFK (German Center for Art History), Paris
Professional Activities:
2025-present Director
Center for European Studies
Rutgers University
2025-present Member of Editorial Board Zeitschrift für Psychoanalyse
2020-present Director of working group The Cliché
Center for Cultural Analysis, Rutgers University
2020-2022 Faculty Mentor
Interdisciplinary Honors College
2020-present Member of the Advisory Board
Center for European Studies, Rutgers University
Publications (selected):
Manipulations: Hands at Work in European Modernism, Boston, Berlin: DeGruyter 2025. (German | English)
“Auto-Fiktion. Zur Konjunktur des Ich in der Gegenwartsliteratur,“ Zeitschrift für deutsche Philologie, 2025, 3-19.
“Affekt und Form. Marseille als Kaleidoskop des Transitorischen,“ in: Jahrbuch für Exilforschung, 42: Exil und Emotionen, Berlin/Boston: DeGruyter, 2024, 283-299.
“Manus ludens. Mabuse's playful hands”, in: Screen. 64:1, spring 2023, 118-124.
“Bergamo. On the Longevity of Pandemic Images,” in: KWI-Blog, spring 2023
“Un, der Vampir – Versuch einer Analogie,“ in: RISS. Zeitschrift für Psychoanalyse, no. 96, fall 2022, 72-81.
“Technological Reproduction at Odds: Hand and Cinematography in Robert Wiene’s The Hands of Orlac” in: Cinema&Cie, 35, spring 2021, 41-51.
“Das Informe. Poetiken der Hand bei Paul Valéry,“ in z.B. Zeitschrift zum Beispiel, 3, 2019, 97-126.
“Paul Valéry. Entwendung als Handhabe,“ in: Entwendungen. Walter Benjamin und seine Quellen, ed. Jessica Nitsche, Nadine Werner (Paderborn: Fink, 2019), pp. 389-413.
Unbedingte Universitäten, vol. 1: Was passiert? Stellungnahmen zur Lage der Universität, ed. Johanna-Charlotte Horst, Johannes Kagerer, Regina Karl et al. (Zürich: Diaphanes, 2010).
Unbedingte Universitäten, vol. 2: Was ist Universität? Texte und Positionen zu einer Idee, ed. Johanna-Charlotte Horst, Johannes Kagerer, Regina Karl et al. (Zürich: Diaphanes, 2010).
Translations:
Jamieson Webster, “Endnoten. Palliativpflege in Zeiten einer Pandemie,” trans. Regina Karl, in: RISS. Zeitschrift für Psychoanalyse, 95, 2021, 151-162.
Jean-Claude Milner: Das klare Werk. Lacan – die Wissenschaft – die Philosophie, trans. Regina Karl, Anna Sophie Luhn (Wien:Turia+Kant, 2013).
Judith Butler: Kritik, Dissens, Disziplinarität, trans. Regina Karl, Vera Kaulbarsch, Elias Kreuzmair, Adrian Renner (Zürich: Diaphanes, 2011).
Courses Taught at Rutgers:
Undergraduate Courses "Classics of German Cinema"
Undergraduate Lecture Course, German and Cinema Studies
"Contemporary European and German Seminar"
Advanced Undergraduate Course, Cinema, European, and German Studies
"Unheimliche Heimat: Introduction to Literary and Cultural Analysis"
Advanced German-Language Undergraduate Course
"Double Trouble: Replicas, Alter Egos, and Doppelgangers"
Undergraduate Lecture Course, German and Comparative Literature
"Built to be Human? Introduction to Literary and Cultural Analysis"
Advanced German-Language Undergraduate Course
Graduate Courses "Shame"
German Studies
"Post-: German-Speaking Theater Then and Now"
German Studies
"Cinemania: Appeal and the Anxiety of the Moving Image"
German and Cinema Studies
"Visions of Europe: The Films of the Berlin School"
German and Cinema Studies