Zoë Burgard

Zoë Burgard works on early modern and modern German and Italian, as well as English and French, literature. Her research focuses on narrative writing as trauma response, manifestations of self-fashioning, critical disability studies, nation building and collapse, and translation studies.

Her first book project, currently in progress, is based on her dissertation, “Witness to Collapse: Early Modern and Modernist Fictions,” which explored works by Ariosto, Grimmelshausen, Svevo, and Musil as reactions to political, religious, and social schisms in early modern and modern Italy, Germany, and Austria. Her next project will be a study of women’s writing as an act of (self-) creation in early modern, nineteenth-century, and modern Italian, German, and English literature.

At Smith this fall, she is teaching two sections of introductory German language, as well as a 300-level topics course entitled “Deutsche Geschichte(n): History and Literature in 20th Century Germany.” Before coming to Smith, she taught at Yale as a graduate instructor, where she taught language and content courses in the German and Italian departments and composition courses on translation theory and critical disability studies in the English department. She has also worked in study abroad education in Genoa, Italy.