Eric Rentschler

Eric Rentschler

Arthur Kingsley Porter Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures
Affiliate of Art, Film, and Visual Studies
Eric Rentschler

Eric Rentschler received his academic training in German literature, German history, and European intellectual history, studying in Stuttgart, Bonn, and Prague, before taking his doctoral degree at the University of Washington. He has been awarded Guggenheim, Humboldt, ACLS, DAAD, and Fulbright grants as well as the Joseph R. Levenson Memorial Teaching Prize for Senior Faculty at Harvard (2001) and the Walter Channing Cabot Fellowship (2003). He is a faculty member of the Film and Visual Studies Program and the convener of the monthly Film and Visual Studies Colloquium. He was the director of the annual Berlin Film Program offered by the Harvard Summer School (in cooperation with the Deutsche Film- und Fernsehakademie Berlin). He is also an editor of New German Critique, and, with Anton Kaes, co-director of the German Film Institute held most recently at the University of Michigan.

Selected Publications

Articles on film history, theory, and criticism have appeared in collections and periodicals. Books include West German Film in the Course of Time (Redgrave, 1984), German Film and Literature (Methuen, 1986), West German Filmmakers on Film (Holmes & Meier, 1988), Augenzeugen (Verlag der Autoren, 1988, with Hans Helmut Prinzler; second updated edition 2001), The Films of G.W. Pabst (Rutgers UP, 1990), The Ministry of Illusion (Harvard UP, 1996), Neuer Deutscher Film (Reclam, 2012, with Norbert Grob and Hans Helmut Prinzler), and The Use and Abuse of Cinema: German Legacies from the Weimar Era to the Present (Columbia UP, 2015). His current book project is German Film Features of the Kohl Era: Before the Wall Went Down.

Contact Information

Barker Center 350