Curtis Swope

Visiting Lecturer in Writing Program

Contact
Email:
cs131@wellesley.edu
Department
German Studies
Writing

I am a Distinguished Visiting Lecturer in the German Studies Department and in the Writing Program. Though my main field is modern German literature, my expertise is wide-ranging and includes European socialist literature and film, European modern architecture, and Latin American socialist art. Upcoming and current courses I am teaching include a first-year seminar, "Europe in Hollywood," and a bridge course in German on the city of Berlin and its culture.

My research agenda is highly interdisciplinary. My most recent book - on the Mexican muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros - just appeared in Fall 2024 with Manchester University Press in the UK. I have articles forthcoming on Anna Seghers and Marxism, the reactions of communist writers in the Americas to the events of 1968 in Paris and Prague, and on Bertolt Brecht and Marxist ecology. I have articles under review or in progress on race in the work of Siqueiros, the politics of Baroque techniques in Siqueiros's murals, and on the late work of Diego Rivera in connection to international debates in Marxist aesthetics. I am the editor of the critical edition of a late novel by Anna Seghers for Aufbau publishers and am currently in the early stages of a book project on East German literature and reformist/democratic theories and practices of communism. A book on the contradictory culture of the city of Leipzig in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is underway, but is a longer-term project.

Education

  • B.A., Middlebury College
  • M.A., University of Pennsylvania
  • Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania

Current and upcoming courses

Europe in Hollywood

WRIT157

After World War I, Europe was a morass of political violence, economic instability, and social malaise. It was also the site of groundbreaking innovations in art, literature, architecture, and film. As fascism cast its shadow across the continent, many radical intellectuals from Germany, Austria, and elsewhere fled to Los Angeles, California. This capital of sunshine, success, and superficiality was profoundly unlike the worlds that these socialist and liberal artists and thinkers left behind. Yet, the bubbly culture of Tinseltown provided both a foundation and a foil for their creative work, much of which has had long-lasting influence on American culture. Interdisciplinary and historical, the course encourages students to put themselves in dialogue with the urgent stakes of a cultural exchange still very much relevant to our own time.