Faculty | SIU

German

Christopher Chiasson received his Ph.D. in Modern German Literature and Culture from Indiana University. He works on the emergence of narratives in unusual places: the stories that arise from visual artifacts in German Romantic literature; the possible stories of "the people" that history and sociology created as they became academic disciplines; and stories that arise from stasis in slow cinema. His general interests include narrative theory, psychoanalysis, Marxism, and the history of ideas. He has taught courses on the Brothers Grimm, witches, Norse myth, Viennese Modernism, detective stories, Nazi cinema, and the human body from Winckelmann to Leni Riefenstahl.

He has published articles on the Brothers' Grimm "Faithful Johannes", Goethe's novel Elective Affinities, and the Mabuse films of Fritz Lang. He is working on articles on the figure of the neighbor in Heinrich von Kleist and the idea of community in Wilhelm Raabe, as well as adapting his dissertation into a monograph provisionally entitled Stories from Stone: Statues in German Romanticism. He taught at the University of Pittsburgh and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln before coming to SIU.