bkosta

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Kosta
bkosta@arizona.edu
Office
Learning Services Building 304
Kosta, Barbara
Professor and Department Head (on Sabbatical in Spring 2024)

Barbara Kosta is professor and head of the Department of German Studies at the University of Arizona. She is also an affiliated member of Gender and Women Studies and Film and Television. Kosta’s research concentrates on gender and sexuality in twentieth-century and contemporary German and Austrian literature, culture and film. Her publications include Auf Deutsch! First Year German Textbook (Prentice Hall), Recasting Autobiography: Women's Counterfictions in Contemporary German Literature and Film (Cornell University Press), Willing Seduction: The Blue Angel, Marlene Dietrich, Mass Culture (Berghahn Press). She is the co-editor of Writing Against Boundaries: Gender, Ethnicity and Nationality in the German-speaking Context (Rodopoi) and Women Writing War: From German Colonialism to WWI (DeGruyter). She has published numerous articles on contemporary German film and literature, on Austrian literature as well as on literature, film, and visual culture of the Weimar Republic that focuses on the modern woman.

Kosta received her Ph.D. in German from the University of California, Berkeley. She is the recipient of Fulbright and DAAD awards for her research on German cinema, twentieth-century autobiographical filming and writing. Kosta served as President of the Coalition of Women in German. She is on the Executive Committee of the ADFL.

 

 

Currently Teaching

GER 498H – Honors Thesis

An honors thesis is required of all the students graduating with honors. Students ordinarily sign up for this course as a two-semester sequence. The first semester the student performs research under the supervision of a faculty member; the second semester the student writes an honors thesis.

An honors thesis is required of all the students graduating with honors. Students ordinarily sign up for this course as a two-semester sequence. The first semester the student performs research under the supervision of a faculty member; the second semester the student writes an honors thesis.

GER 325 – German Cinema

This course provides a historical overview from the 1920s to the present, with a focus on genres and movements such as expressionism, film noir, propaganda, New German Cinema, the Berlin School, by filmmakers such as Lang, Murnau, Riefenstahl, Ade and Akin. Films will be analyzed and discussed as aesthetic works and historical cultural products, and social issues such as gender, class, race, ethnicity and national identity will be explored. This course may be applied toward the major or minor.