Areas of Expertise
- Film and visual studies
- Mass media, pop culture, and the art of propaganda
- Perpetrator and genocide studies, German colonial wars, the study of the Holocaust, and Holocaust education
- Crowd studies and iconography of the masses
- The poetics and politics of space, violence and architecture, wastelands and fringe territories
- Border studies and critical urban theory
- Modernism and the avant-garde (US, Europe, Soviet Union)
- Linguistic violence and cultural hegemony, Sprachkrise and Sprachkritik
- Curricular design, visual literacy, language pedagogy
Education
Ph.D. Harvard University (2024)
Courses
- GERM 102 (S) SEM Elementary German II
- GERM 103 (F) SEM Intermediate German I
- GERM 104 (S) SEM Intermediate German II
- GERM 213/COMP 267 (S) SEM Monster Mash: Myths, Movies and the Monsters in Our Midst
- GERM 243/COMP 244 SEM Rage against the Machines: The Technological Imaginary in Art and Film (not offered 2026/27)
- GERM 252/JWST 252/COMP 285 (F) SEM Come and See: Holocaust Cinema and the Iconography of Genocide
- GERM 318 SEM Paranoid Nation: Angst and Anxiety in German Film (not offered 2026/27)
Publications
Work in progress:
- Mass Conceptions: The Holocaust and the Iconology of Crowd Design (second book project)
- “Inferno: Gender, Genocide, and the German Language,” an essay discussing Mela Hartwig’s exceptional novel Inferno (1948/2018) and her experience of the war and the Holocaust in the 1930s and 1940s as an Austrian Jewish woman.
- “Urban Configurations: Inscribing the Body into/onto the City in Valie Export’s Körperkonfigurationen,” an essay discussing the relationship between imperial architecture and female bodies.
Publications and other projects:
- The Art of Overcoming the Wall: Cinematic Reflections on the Berlin Border (forthcoming monograph)
- “The Ecstasies of Mela Hartwig-Spira: Between Laughter and Terror.” Women in German Expressionism: Gender, Sexuality, Activism. Edited by Anke Finger and Julie Shoults. University of Michigan Press, 2023.
- “Urban Planning” (co-authored with Werner Schwarz, Wien Museum), “Architecture” (co-authored with Georg Vasold), “Interior Design.” The Red Vienna Sourcebook, edited by Rob McFarland, Georg Spitaler, Ingo Zechner (Camden House, 2020).
- “Stadtplanung” (co-authored with Werner Schwarz, Wien Museum), “Architektur” (co-authored with Georg Vasold), “Wohnen.” Das Rote Wien. Schlüsseltexte der Zweiten Wiener Moderne, 1919-1934, edited by Rob McFarland, Georg Spitaler, Ingo Zechner (De Gruyter, 2020).
- The Burning Child (2018), a documentary by Joseph Leo Koerner and Christian D. Bruun.
- “Concrete Dreams: Architecture and Space in late GDR Film.” THRESHOLDS 46: Scatter! (Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2018).
More Information
Aleks Kudriashova (Prof. Kay) is a Visiting Assistant Professor of German. She received her Ph.D. from Harvard University for a dissertation on the Berlin Wall, The Art of Overcoming the Wall: Cinematic Reflections on the Berlin Border. Her work, broadly speaking, explores the intersections of the poetics and politics of space, mass media, propaganda, and popular culture. In 2024, she was awarded the Sosland Foundation Fellowship to conduct research at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum for her second book project (Mass Conceptions: The Holocaust and the Iconology of Crowd Design), which investigates the problematic iconology and visual history of crowd representation in the context of Nazi rule and the Holocaust.
Contact Info
Office Hours Spring 2026: sign up (preferred) or drop by on Tuesdays (11:30-1:30 PM) and Thursdays (1:30-3 PM)