I studied at the University of Cologne in Germany and at Emmanuel College, Cambridge. Before joining the Media Arts Department at Royal Holloway in 2006, I worked as a strategic planner in one of London’s top ten advertising agencies and taught at the University of Cambridge and Oxford Brookes University. My research and teaching interests include migrant and diasporic cinema in Europe; German film history and culture; the relationship between film, history and memory discourse; cinema and national identity; modernism; and issues of film censorship. Postgraduate students who would like to undertake research in any of these areas are most welcome to contact me.

I have been amongst the first scholars in the Anglophone world to research DEFA (Deutsche Film-Aktiengesellschaft), the state-owned and controlled film production and distribution company of the former German Democratic Republic. My monograph, Hollywood behind the Wall: The Cinema of East Germany (Manchester University Press, 2005) is a representative history of East German film culture from 1946 to the present. In this comparative study I demonstrate that East German cinema occupies an ambivalent position between German national cinema on the one hand and East European and Soviet cinema on the other.

Between 2006 and 2008, I led an international Research Network on Migrant and Diasporic Cinema in Contemporary Europe (www.migrantcinema.net), which was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council as part of the Diasporas, Migration & Identities Programme. The Network brought together researchers, filmmakers, policy makers and representatives from the cultural sector. It explored how the films of migrant and diasporic filmmakers have redefined our understanding of European identity as constructed and narrated in European cinema. During the past two decades the cultural spaces occupied by migrants have shifted from the ‘subnational’ to the ‘transnational’ as representations of migrant identities and experiences have been articulated in a variety of media. The growing presence of migrant and diasporic cultures within Europe and on European screens calls for a re-evaluation of the established notion of national cinema in a global context. As part of the Migrant and Diasporic Cinema research project, I organised a series of international conferences, workshops and film screenings (www.migrantcinema.net/events/).

My publications on the topic include the forthcoming anthology European Cinema in Motion: Migrant and Diasporic Film in Contemporary Europe (Wallflower Press 2010) and a special issue of New Cinemas, entitled ‘Turkish-German Dialogues on Screen’. I am currently working on a monograph on the diasporic family in cinema.

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Screening the War in Germany http://german.lss.wisc.edu/conferences/stwig/ is another international research project in which I am currently involved and which reflects my interest in the relationship between film, history and memory discourse. In the context of this two-year project, led by Professor Paul Cooke (University of Leeds) and Professor Marc Silberman (University of Wisconsin, Madison) and funded by the British Academy and the World Wide University Network, I am investigating the representation of female suffering and victimhood in DEFA’s anti-fascist films. 

Publications:

Books and Edited Journals:

	European Cinema in Motion: Migrant and Diasporic Film in Contemporary Europe, eds. Daniela Berghahn and Claudia Sternberg, London and New York: Wallflower Press (forthcoming 2010)
	Turkish German Dialogues on Screen, Special guest-edited issue of New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film, 7:1, 2009, 98pp.
	Hollywood behind the Wall: The Cinema of East Germany, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005, 296pp.
	Millennial Essays on Film and other German Studies, eds. Daniela Berghahn and Alan Bance, Oxford and Bern: Lang 2002, 193pp.
	Unity and Diversity in the New Europe, eds. Barrie Axford, Daniela Berghahn and Nick Hewlett, Oxford and Bern: Lang, 2000, 384pp.
	German Studies in Transition, Daniela Berghahn, Eva Kolinsky and Thomas Scharf, Cambridge: EBA, 1997, 147pp.
	Raumdarstellung im englischen Roman der Moderne (The Representation of Place in the English Modernist Novel), Frankfurt/Main: Lang, 1989, 511pp.

Peer-reviewed journal articles:

‘Remembering the Stasi in a fairy tale of redemption: Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s Das Leben der Anderen’, Oxford German Studies, special issue From ‘Stasiland’ to ‘Ostalgie’: Remembering the Stasi 20 Years On, ed. Karen Leeder, 38:3, forthcoming 2009.

‘From Turkish greengrocer to drag queen: reassessing patriarchy in recent Turkish German coming-of-age films’, New Cinemas, special issue on Turkish German Dialogues on Screen, ed. Daniela Berghahn, 7:1, 2009, pp. 55-69.

‘Turkish-German dialogues on screen’, New Cinemas, special issue on Turkish German Dialogues on Screen, ed. Daniela Berghahn, 7:1, 2009, pp. 3-9.

‘No place like home? Or impossible homecomings in the films of Fatih Akin’, New Cinemas, 4:3, 2006, pp. 141-157.

 ‘Do the right thing? Female allegories of nation in Aleksandr Askoldov’s Komissar (USSR 1967/1987) and Konrad Wolf’s Der geteilte Himmel (GDR 1964)’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 26:4 (2006), pp. 561-577.

‘Post-1990 screen memories: how East and West German cinema remembers the Third Reich and the Holocaust’, German Life and Letters, 59:2, 2006, pp. 294-308.

‘“Leben... ein Blick genügt doch“: Der utopische Augenblick in Wim Wenders’ road movies’, Monatshefte, 91:1 (1999), 64-83.

‘Fiction into film and the discourse of fidelity: A case study of Volker Schlöndorff's re-interpretation of Homo Faber’, German Life and Letters, 49:1 (1996), 72-87.

Chapters in edited books

‘Coming of age in the hood: The diasporic youth film and questions of genre’, European Cinema in Motion: Migrant and Diasporic Film in Contemporary Europe, eds. Daniela Berghahn and Claudia Sternberg, London and New York: Wallflower Press (forthcoming 2010).

‘Locating migrant and diasporic cinema: Terms and terminologies’ (with Claudia Sternberg), European Cinema in Motion: Migrant and Diasporic Film in Contemporary Europe, eds. Daniela Berghahn and Claudia Sternberg, London and New York: Wallflower Press (forthcoming 2010).

‘Resistance of the heart: Female suffering and victimhood in DEFA’s antifascist films’, Screening War: New Perspectives on German Suffering, eds. Paul Cooke and Marc Silberman, Rochester: Camden House (forthcoming 2009).

‘Diasporas, film and cinema’, Diasporas: Concepts, Identities, Intersections, eds. Kim Knott and Sean McLoughlin, London: Zed Books (forthcoming 2009).

‘Frauen als Allegorien nationaler Geschichte in Alexander Askoldovs Die Kommissarin und Konrad Wolfs Der geteilte Himmel’, eds. Michael Wedel and Elke Schieber Konrad Wolf. Werk und Wirkung. Berlin: Vistas, 2009, pp. 223-245.

 ‘Sophie Scholl Biopics: Wandel im öffentlichen Gedächtnis einer weiblichen Ikone des Widerstandes’, Ikonen, Helden, Aussenseiter: Film und Biographie, eds. Manfred Mittermayer, Patric Blaser et al, Vienna: Zsolany, 2009, pp. 105-121.

‘Das ostdeutsche Kino nach der Wiedervereinigung’, Views from Abroad: Die DDR aus britischer Perspektive, eds. Peter Barker, Marc-Dietrich Ohse and Dennis Tate, Bielefeld: Bertelsmann Verlag, 2007, pp. 259-272.

‘Cultural legitimisation and critique in East German period films’, New German Literature: Life Writing and Dialogue with the Arts, eds. Frank Finlay, Julian Preece and Ruth Owen, Oxford and Bern: Lang, 2007.

‘East German cinema after unification’, in: David Clarke (ed.), German Cinema after Unification, London and New York: Continuum, 2006, pp. 79-103.

‘Film censorship in “a clean state”: The case of Klein and Kohlhaase’s Berlin um die Ecke, in: Censorship & Cultural Regulation in the Modern Age, ed. Beate Müller, Amsterdam and Atlanta: Critical Studies Series, Rodopi, 2004, pp. 111-139.

‘Liars and traitors: Unheroic resistance in antifascist DEFA films’, in: Millennial Essays on Film and other German Studies, eds. Daniela Berghahn and Alan Bance, Oxford and Bern: Lang 2002, pp. 19-36.

‘The forbidden films: Film censorship in East German cinema in the wake of the Eleventh Plenum’, in: 100 Years of European Cinema: Entertainment or Ideology?, eds. Diana Holmes and Alison Smith, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000, pp.40-50.

‘Analysing Unity and Diversity in the New Europe’ with Barrie Axford and Nick Hewlett, in: Unity and Diversity in the New Europe, Oxford and Bern: Lang, 2000, pp. 13-26.

‘Censorship in East German cinema: The case of Spur der Steine’, in: From Classical Shades to Vickers Victorious: Shifting Perspectives in British German Studies, eds. Steve Giles, Peter Graves, Oxford and Bern: Lang, 1999, pp. 183-97.

‘The re-evaluation of Goethe and the Classical tradition in the films of Egon Günther and Siegfried Kühn’, in: DEFA: East German Cinema 1946-1992, eds. Seán Allen, John Sandford. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 1999, pp. 222-244.

‘“Womit sonst kann man heute erzählen als mit Bildern?“: Images and Stories in Wim Wenders’ Der Himmel über Berlin and In weiter Ferne, so nah!’, in: Text into Image: Image into Text, eds. Jeff Morrison, Florian Krobb. Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi, 1997, pp. 329-338.

Other

Award holder of the 2009 Royal Holloway College Teaching Prize for Innovation.

Contributor to the BBC Radio Four programme ‘A German Hero’, broadcast on 29 September 2008.

 

Email: Daniela.Berghahn@rhul.ac.uk