Amy Hill

A Nashville native, Amy joined Vanderbilt University in the fall of 2016. She completed her B.A. in German Studies at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville in 2010, and then accepted a Fulbright Teaching Assistantship in Dortmund, Germany in 2011. She remained in Dortmund, receiving her M.A in Applied Literary and Cultural Studies from the Technische Universität Dortmund (2014), where she also served as an instructor in the Sprachpraxis, teaching courses on academic writing and English grammar. After teaching at the university and other schools and institutions for several years, Amy returned to pursue her doctorate in 2016 in German and Comparative Media Analysis and Practice. Her research interests are diverse, with a focus on the intersection of sexology and feminist crime fiction, as well as cross-cultural connections in beauty and body cultures on various social media platforms in Germany and America.

 

Through the analysis of historical cases, sexological research of the Wilhelmine and Weimar eras, and feminist crime fiction from the 1990s, Amy’s dissertation focuses on how the figure of the Lustmörderin (sex murderess) interpellates the constellation of gender, subjectivity, and sexual violence as it relates to key crises in 20th century Germany.