Meet Caroline Schaumann
Meet Caroline Schaumann
A native of Berlin, Caroline Schaumann received her Ph.D. in German Studies at the University of California at Davis, with designated emphases in Critical Theory and Feminist Theory and Research. After teaching at Middlebury College, she joined the Department of German Studies at Emory University. Schaumann has held an Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Fellowship for Experienced Researchers in Potsdam, two DAAD (German American Exchange Service) Research Fellowships in Berlin and Vechta, and a University Research Committee-Halle Institute Global Research Award in Munich. In 2018, she received the Robert B. Hascall Faculty Sustainability Innovator Award from Emory’s Office of Sustainability Initiatives. She has taught two semesters at Deep Springs College, and in 2024 was a Guest Professor at Innsbruck University, Austria.
Matthews Crest, Tuolumne Meadows, Yosemite National Park
Matthews Crest, Tuolumne Meadows, Yosemite National Park
Schaumann’s research focuses predominantly on ecocriticism and the environmental humanities, cultural histories of exploration and mountaineering, and the Anthropocene. She is currently completing research for a book-length project on the German Schlagintweit brothers in the Alps, Himalaya, and Sierra Nevada. Her co-edited anthology Global Mountain Cinema (with Kamaal Haque and Christian Quendler), is forthcoming with Edinburgh University in 2025.
Bear Creek Spire, Sierra Nevada, California
Bear Creek Spire, Sierra Nevada, California
Examining depictions of exploration in the Alps, Andes, and the Sierra Nevada, her second monograph, Peak Pursuits: The Emergence of Mountaineering in the Nineteenth Century (Yale University Press, 2020), traces the exciting and contradictory, the idealized and often flawed cultural history of mountaineering. This research also resulted in Mountains and the German Mind, a co-edited anthology (with Sean Ireton) of English translations documenting the German cultural history of alpinism (Boydell & Brewer, 2020). The previous anthology, Heights of Reflection: Mountains in the German Imagination from the Middle Ages to the Twenty-First Century (Boydell & Brewer 2012), also co-edited with Sean Ireton, examined the lure of mountains in German literature, philosophy, film, music, and culture from the Middle Ages to the present. With Heather I. Sullivan, she edited German Ecocriticism in the Anthropocene (Palgrave, 2017), an anthology gathering essays on both canonical and non-canonical German-language texts and films.
Schaumann has published more than forty research articles on Alexander von Humboldt, mountain films, German ecocriticism, the Anthropocene, and memory cultures.
Her research interests include the environmental humanities, cultural histories of exploration and mountaineering, German cinema, and German literature and culture.
She is the author of Memory Matters: Generational Responses to Germany’s Nazi Past in Recent Women’s Literature (Walter De Gruyter, 2008) that considers contemporary German literature and German-Jewish literature in the aftermath of the Holocaust.