TODD DECKER
Todd Decker is Assistant Professor of Music, with a joint appointment in American Culture Studies, as well as Film and Media. He received his Ph.D. in historical musicology at the University of Michigan in 2007; his dissertation, entitled “Black / White Encounters on the American Musical Stage and Screen (1924-2005),” examined signal examples of interracial performance on Broadway, in Hollywood, and on the American opera stage across the twentieth century. His principal area of film research is studio-era Hollywood, with an emphasis on the film musical and music in film. Prof. Decker’s work seeks to link the music of the Hollywood film with the history of popular music and American musical culture more generally, bringing popular music, film, dance, and culture together in an interdisciplinary context that speaks to the disciplines of film studies, musicology, and dance history. The overarching history of racial segregation, integration, and the African American struggle for racial equality as evidenced in America’s musical life is of central interest across his work. His current book project links Fred Astaire’s film and television career to the histories of popular song and jazz and explores Astaire’s dances accompanied by African American musicians in the segregated world of the film musical.

Outside his work on film, Prof. Decker has published articles on eighteenth-century keyboard composer Domenico Scarlatti and holds a master of music in harpsichord performance from the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. He has many years experience performing on harpsichord, piano, and organ, as well as conducting and staging musical theater.

JENNIFER KAPCZYNSKI
Asst. Professor Jennifer Kapczynski (PhD University of California – Berkeley) is Assistant Professor of German at Washington University in St. Louis. She received her Ph.D. in German from the University of California, Berkeley, in 2003. Pofessor Kapczynski’s research focuses principally on twentieth century literature and cinema. Her dissertation, “The German Patient: Metaphors of National Illness in Postwar Literature and Film” examines the place of disease in discussions of German guilt after 1945, and demonstrates that illness provided a key framework for postwar thinkers attempting to explain the emergence and impact of fascism. She has published work related to this project (“Homeward Bound? Peter Lorre’s The Lost Man,” forthcoming in New German Critique), as well as articles on such diverse writers as Heinrich Böll and Heinrich von Kleist. In other recent projects, she has explored the construction of heroism in the 1950s German war film genre. Her future research interests include a study of race and the reception of “Americanism” in Germany after World War Two. Professor Kapczynski’s broader research and teaching interests include nineteenth through twenty-first century literature, film studies, gender theory, nationalism, and German-American relations. She has taught courses on the “Zero Hour,” Franz Kafka, Gender and Postwar German Culture, and Film Noir.

LUTZ KOEPNICK
Lutz Koepnick (Ph.D., Stanford University) is a professor of German and Film and Media Studies. He is the author of Framing Attention: Windows on Modern German Culture (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007), The Dark Mirror: German Cinema between Hitler and Hollywood (University of California Press, 2002), Walter Benjamin and the Aesthetics of Power (University of Nebraska Press, 1999) and Nothungs Modernität: Wagners Ring und die Poesie der Politik im neunzehnten Jahrhundert (1994). He is the co-editor of The Cosmopolitan Screen: German Cinema and the Global Imaginary, 1945 to the Present (University of Michigan Press, 2007), Caught by Politics: Hitler Exiles and American Visual Culture (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), and Sound Matters: Essays on the Acoustics of German Culture (Berghahn Books, 2004). Research interests include 19th- to 21st-century literature, film, media, media aesthetics, visual culture, and critical theory. Koepnick also serves as the Curator of New Media at the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, where most recently he co-curated the shows Window | Interface (2007) and [Grid<>Matrix] (2006).

CONSTANTIN PARVULESCU
(PhD, University of Minnesota) is currently working on a book project provisionally titled “The Grand Experiment: Eastern European Cinema in the Cold War Era.” The book investigates Eastern European film as a site of decisive debates within the history of the Left, on issues like sexual revolution, gender roles, education, and the writing of history. It argues for a generous reconsideration of this cinema in a post-Cold War, global framework; and proposes it as inspirational for the development of a socially committed film in the twenty-first century. Constantin teaches a variety of classes in European Cinema, including Eastern European Cinema and Italian Neorealism. Other research and teaching interests include German literature and cinema, film theory, and the intellectual history of the Left, especially the relationship between Marxism and anarchism.

STEPHAN SCHINDLER
Prof. Stephan Schindler (Ph.D., University of California-Irvine), Germanic Languages and Literature, is the author of Eingebildete Korper: Phantasierte Sexualitat in der Goethezeit (Imagined Bodies: Fantasized Sexuality in the Age of Goethe) and Das Kind als Subjekt: Die Erfindung der Kindheit in Roman des 18. Jahrhunderts (The Child as Subject: The Discovery of Childhood in the 18th Century Novel). He has also written articles on postmodernism, literature and terrorism, 18th-century pornography, homoeroticism, psychology, the Amazons, and Weimar Film. His research interests include 18th- and 20th-century literature, gender studies, film studies, Holocaust studies, and cultural studies. Prof. Schindler has taught at Princeton University and the University of Tuebingen (Germany). At Washington University, he has won the Council of Students in Arts and Sciences Teaching Award.