Darcy C. Buerkle

Assistant Professor

Professor Buerkle’s research focuses on modern European women and gender history with an emphasis on German and German Jewish intellectual and cultural history. She has worked extensively on German visual culture of the early twentieth century. Related interests include the history of the social sciences, the history of psychoanalysis and contemporary debates in the philosophy of history.

Her recent publications include an essay on the reconstruction of affect through Eyal Sivan’s film “The Specialist” and Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem  (2008) and a piece in which she explores the relationship between political commitment, anxiety and early historiography of emotion (forthcoming, 2009). In 2007 she published on the sex reform minded doctor-writer Charlotte Wolff (1897-1986) and on the artist Charlotte Salomon (1917-1943). Other work has also centered on questions of visual culture and the “historicized spectator,” such as a piece on women and portraiture in Weimar Berlin and another on women and advertising in Weimar Germany.

Presently she is completing a book manuscript entitled, Jews, Gender and the Visual Rhetoric of Suicide in Early Twentieth Century Germany.

Professor Buerkle's course offerings include two surveys in European history, Women and Gender in Modern Europe 1789-1918 (HST 252) and Women and Gender in Contemporary Europe (HST 253). She also teaches colloquia and seminars such as History and Memory (HST 246), Trauma and History (HST 346), History of Psychoanalysis (HST 255), Recent Debates in the Historiography of Gender and Sexuality (HST 350, Spring 08) and Philosophies of History (HST 350, Spring 09).

Phone: 413-585-3724
Office: Hillyer 308
Email: dbuerkle@smith.edu
Office Hours: Thursday 4:30-6:00 p.m. and by appointment

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