German Studies
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Maria-Regina Kecht

Associate Professor

Kecht

Email kecht@rice.edu Phone: x5845 Office: 330 Rayzor Hall

Education

  • PhD, Indiana University, 1985
  • PhD, Innsbruck University, Austria, 1982
  • MA, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1979
  • Teacher’s Diploma for Russian, Pushkin Institute, Moscow, Russia, 1978

Areas of Interest

  • twentieth-century Austrian literature
  • women and gender
  • cultural literacy

Personal Statement

Maria-Regina Kecht teaches twentieth-century culture/literature of the German-speaking countries. She offers a variety of courses that highlight issues of politics and literature, ethics and literature, and representation of gender. Her so-called language courses are content-based and focus on student tasks promoting language proficiency and cultural literacy. In her research she has specialized in post-1945 Austrian literature, examining works by Aichinger, Bachmann, Faschinger, Henisch, Jelinek, Mitgutsch, Reichart, Rabinovici, and others.

Professor Kecht is currently completing a book manuscript that explores how Austrian women writers have captured the experience of National Socialism. She is also working on another book project (together with Professor Helga Schreckenberger at the University of Vermont) that approaches the city of Vienna as an urban narrative while asking how this multilayered narrative can be made accessible to students of Austrian culture.

Beyond her busy conference schedule and her research for publications, over the past three years Professor Kecht has been the editor of the international quarterly Modern Austrian Literature, the journal of the Modern Austrian Literature and Culture Association (President: Professor Katherine Arens, University of Texas, Austin). Her entrepreneurial spirit is reflected in her great success at grant-writing that has led to innovative curricular programs and prestigious development opportunities supported by grants from FIPSE, NEH, and private foundations. She hopes to offer another NEH Institute in Vienna in the summer of 2009.

Selected Publications

  • Ed., Gender, History, and Memory, special issue of Studies in 20th and 21st Century Literature, 31 (2007).
  • Ed. with Katharina von Hammerstein, Languages Across the Curriculum: Interdisciplinary Structures and Internationalized Education (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2000).

  • “Weltgeschichte in Erinnerung: Kriegsgeschehen in den Texten von Bettina Balàka und Helene Flöss,” in Karl Müller und Hans Wagener (eds.), 1918 (Vienna: Böhlau, forthcoming in 2008).
  • “Anna Mitgutsch, Haus der Kindheit: Mourning, Remembrance, and Restitution,” in Paul Dvorak (ed.), Modern Austrian Prose: Interpretations and Insights (Riverside, CA: Ariadne Press, forthcoming in 2008).
  • “Literarische Topographie der Einwanderung: Rabinovicis Roman Ohnehin,” forthcoming in Österreich in Geschichte und Literatur 52 (2008).
  • “The Polyphony of Remembrance: Reading Kinder der Toten” in Matthias Konzett and M. Lamb-Faffelberger (eds.), Elfriede Jelinek: Writing Woman, Nation, and Identity (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2007), 189-217.
  • “Elfriede Jelinek in absentia oder die Sprache zur Sprache bringen” Seminar: A Journal of Germanic Studies 43 (2007), 351-65.
  • “Faschinger’s Aesthetic Analysis of Power Relations in Wiener Passion” Colloquia Germanica, 39 (2006), 159-84.
  • “Wo ist Mauthausen?—Weibliche Erinnerungsräume bei Elisabeth Reichart,” Modern Austrian Literature 35 (2002), 63-8.