`Associate Professor of German

B.A. (Connecticut College)
M.A., Ph.D. (University of Rochester)
Curriculum vitae
  
  


Contact
Chambers 3150
mamccarthy@davidson.edu
Davidson College, Box 6991, Davidson, NC 28035-6991
Phone: 704-894-2266; Fax: 704-894-2782

I graduated from Connecticut  College with a major in English and minor in German. (Honors in major, Magna cum Laude). A Fulbright scholarship took me to the University of Vienna the following year to study Austrian literature. I supplemented my interest in German literature with German film in graduate school at the University of Rochester. Numerous grants, from the Austrian Federal Ministry, the DAAD, and the Heinrich-Hertz-Stiftung for a year of study at the University of Cologne, helped me to pursue dissertation research. My interest in autobiography and the Bildungsroman led to a dissertation called Bodies, Beautiful Souls and Bildung: Reconstituting the First-Person Singular I, which was supported by the Susan B. Anthony Dissertation Fellowship.

Since arriving at Davidson in 1995, I've taught a variety of beginning, intermediate and advanced courses in German literature, film, and culture. My publications and presentations reflect a range of interests in German popular culture, German film and contemporary literature, the films and short stories of Doris Dörrie, American/Weimar film actress Louise Brooks, and the way German women writers and feminists articulate their relationship to the student movement of 1968.

In 2008 my essay "Surface Sheen and Charged Bodies: Louise Brooks as Lulu in Pandora's Box" appeared in the volume Weimer Cinema.  An Essential Guide to the Films of the Era.  Another essay entitled "Entertaining Auteurism: Popular Filmmakers Think about Germany" was published in German Politics and Society.  Previous essays have appeared in the German Quarterly, Camera Obscura, the Women in German Yearbook, and numerous anthologies.

  In 2003 a volume co-edited with Randall Halle, Light Motives. German Popular Cinema in Perspective, was published by Wayne State UP. It includes my essay "Angst Takes a Holiday in Doris Dörrie's Bin ich schön." This essay was recently republished in Straight through the Heart. Doris Dörrie, German Filmmaker and Author.

From 2005 to 2008 I co-edited the Women in German Yearbook. Upcoming essays include "They Were threatening Castration: Germans in The Big Lebowski, to be published in the Journal of Popular Culture, and Somnolent Selfhood: Winterschläfer and Generation Golf, which will appear in the fall 2009 issue of New German Critique.

At Davidson, I have been coordinator for Davidson's Gender Studies concentration as well as Resident Director for the Junior Year Abroad in Würzburg, Germany in 1997-98, 2001-02, and 2002-03.  I am currently coordinator of the Film and Media Studies Concentration, for which I have taught numerous courses.   In the fall of 2008 students in my "Environmentalism on Film" class participated in community-based service learning and produced a film call Farm.  It documents the new Farmer's Market in Davidson, as well as the town's subdivisions and outlying farmland.

I live with my husband, Joachim Ghislain, and children, Nicolas and Nola Marlene, in Davidson.