Kai-Uwe Werbeck

Fall 2024 – On Research Leave

I am an Associate Chair and Associate Professor of German and Affiliate Faculty of Film Studies at UNC Charlotte. My research interests include German postwar film and literature, global horror cinema, hip-hop culture, and media studies. I have published on Heinrich Böll, Rolf Dieter Brinkmann, Rainald Goetz, and no-budget splatter films. I am also one of the translators of Alexander Kluge’s Kong’s Finest Hour. Currently, I am working on a monograph on (West) German horror film after 1945. Critical essays on Dennis Gansel’s Wir sind die Nacht and the German hip-hop old school are forthcoming in 2020. Essays on the concept of home in rubble film and the Gothic in German postwar cinema are works in progress.

Education

Ph.D. in German Literature, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2012

M.A. in German Literature, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2008

DAF-Certificate (Teaching German as a Foreign Language), Ruhr-University Bochum, 2006

M.A. in Cultural Studies, Ruhr-University Bochum, 2005

B.A. (Zwischenpruefung) in Cultural Studies, Ruhr-University Bochum, 2002

Appointments

July 2023 – Present: Associate Chair, Department of Languages, Cultures and Translation, The University of North Carolina at Charlotte

July 2019 – present: Associate Professor, Department of Languages, Cultures and Translation, The University of North Carolina at Charlotte Summer

2019: Faculty, Deutsche Sommerschule am Pazifik, Portland State University

July 2013 – June 2019: Assistant Professor, Department of Languages, Cultures and Translation, The University of North Carolina at Charlotte

2012 – 2013: Lecturer, Interim Director of the German Undergraduate Language Program, Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literature, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Summer

2012 – Summer 2013: Faculty, Middlebury Language Schools, German School, Middlebury College

Specific Research Interests

20th-Century German Literature and Philosophy

German Postwar Horror Cinema

Film Studies

New Media Theory / Game Studies Cultural Studies (German Hip-Hop)

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