UNIVERSITY OF COLOGNE

Ervin Malakaj is associate professor of German studies and affiliate faculty in the Centre for European Studies at the University of British Columbia, Canada. Prior to this appointment, he was assistant professor of German and director of German at Sam Houston State University, USA. Malakaj’s research is located at the intersection of queer studies and German media history with a special interest in affect studies. This work has been supported by grants from, among other, the Fulbright Commission, the DAAD, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. In 2016, he co-founded the international scholarly collective, “Diversity, Decolonization, and the German Curriculum.” For his dedication to research and teaching in international German studies, Malakaj was awarded the 2023 Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm Prize in the junior category. 

• queer studies
• media studies
• affect theory
• queer German media history, 1871-1933
• queer German cinema
• 19th-century literary studies

Divinatory Cultural Techniques: Queer Media Engagement, 1900-1933

Dr. Malakaj will spend the summers 2024-2026 as an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow at the Erich Auerbach Institute conducting research for and writing his next book project, which is conceived as a theory of queer media engagement grounded in the occult. Traditionally, histories of queer media engagement have been informed by the famous Foucauldian paradigm that the homosexual was born in the clinic. Scientific epistemologies underpinning sexology have been understood as the main means for knowledge production about queer lives. Grounding queer knowledge in Enlightenment epistemologies to establish the innateness of queerness was the foundation for reason-driven queer advocacy campaigns. This, in turn, would shape how queer people engaged with and made sense of the world, including how they engaged with media: by adopting empiricist models. While this may have been the case for some, scientific epistemologies were not the only nor even the main means informing queer media engagement. The project will turn to the site of the occult and its proliferation over the course of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in order to study how its non-empiricist divination practices serve as a model for a queer theory of media engagement. Seances, tarot, palmistry, and related divination and communication modes functioned as important venues for queer people to make sense of the world and also develop strategies by which to read/sense media otherwise. Drawing on the holdings at multiple archives in Germany, the study will study heretofore ignored material. In so doing, it seeks to open up new sites for scholarship in queer German studies.

Anders als die Andern, Queer Film Classics Series, eds. Jonathan Crago, Matthew Hays, and Thomas Waugh (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2023).

“Aerial Aesthetics, Queer Intimacy, and the Politics of Repose in the Cinema of Nils Bökamp and Monika Treut,” At the End of Neoliberalism: The Aesthetics and Politics of Contemporary German Film, eds. Claudia Breger and Olivia Landry (Rochester: Camden House, 2024), 202-18.

“Queer Time and Contemporary German Cinema,” co-ed. with Kyle Frackman. Special Issue of The Germanic Review 97.4 (2022).

“Rupture, Slowness, Untimeliness: Queer Time and History in German Studies,” co-ed. with Kyle Frackman. Special Issue of Monatshefte 114.3 (2022).

“Resisting the Traps of Hegemony: Variation in Contemporary German Queer of Color Cinema,” with Priscilla Layne, Routledge Companion to European Cinema, ed. Gábor Gergely & Susan Hayward (New York: Routledge, 2022), 374-84.

Slapstick: An Interdisciplinary Companion, co-ed. with Alena E. Lyons (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2021; paperback published in 2023).

“Queer Time and the Cinematic Pleasures of the locus amoenus in Free Fall,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 29.2 (2023): 237–260.

“Untimeliness and the Balkan Queer Diaspora in Dennis Todorović’s Saša,” The Germanic Review 97. (2022): 340–358.

“Approaches to Queer Temporalities in German Studies,” with Kyle Frackman, Monatshefte 114.3 (2022): 353–62.