Brigitte Peucker

Brigitte Peucker is the Elias Leavenworth Professor Emerita of German and of Film and Media Studies. She received her Ph.D. from Yale University and taught at Yale until 2021.She is the author of From Arcadia to Elysium (Bouvier, 1980); Lyric Descent in the German Romantic Tradition (Yale, 1987); Incorporating Images: Film and the Rival Arts (Princeton, 1995), which appeared as Verkörpernde Bilder, das Bild des Körpers (Vorwerk 8, 1999); and The Material Image: Art and the Real in Film (Stanford, 2007). Her most recent book, Aesthetic Spaces: The Place of Art in Film, appeared in 2019 (Northwestern UP). She is the editor of Wiley-Blackwell’s A Companion to Rainer Werner Fassbinder (2012) and co-editor, with Ido Lewit, of New Approaches to Ernst Lubitsch: A Light Touch (2024).

She writes and taught in the areas of film’s relation to the other arts (intermediality); the films of Alfred Hitchcock; the theory and history of visuality and spectatorship; the classic American horror film; and various aspects of German cinema. Her most recent essays include “Hitchcock’s Undertexts: Objects and Language,” in Journal of Film/Philosophy (2023); “In the Picture: Immersion as Intermedial Strategy,” in  Intermedial Encounters: Essays in Honour of Agnes Petho (2022); and “Ineffability?: The Several Vermeers,” in Screening the Art World, ed. Temenuga Trifonova (Amsterdam UP, 2022). A recent article on Werner Herzog appeared in Hebrew in the Israeli film journal Takriv (2024).

Professor Peucker is the recipient of Woodrow Wilson, Morse, and Mellon fellowships, served as chair of the Film Studies Program, 1986–2000, as chair of the German Department, 1997–2002 and 2003–2004, and was, for many years, director of graduate studies in both departments.