Black Magic Woman

Barbara Hales is Associate Professor of History and Humanities at the University of Houston–Clear Lake. Her research focuses on the cultural and intellectual history of Weimar and Nazi Germany. She has published numerous articles in journals such as German Quarterly, Monatshefte, and Seminar. She recently coedited the volumes Continuity and Crisis in German Cinema 1928–1936 (with Mihaela Petrescu and Valerie Weinstein) for Camden House and Rethinking Jewishness in Weimar Film (with Valerie Weinstein) for Berghahn. Dr. Hales is President of the Houston-based organization Center for Medicine After the Holocaust.

• CONTENTS: The Occult Woman as Metaphor for Weimar’s New Woman – The Ghost – The Vampire and the Monster Double – The Witch and the Gypsy – The Trance-Dancer and Medium.

«Connecting history, public discourse, and literary and filmic renditions of ‘occultwomen,’ Barbara Hales compellingly demonstrates how these figures are bound upwith the fraught position of women in Weimar culture. Her richly textured readingsadd important nuance to our understanding of the complexity of gender in this era.» (Anjeana K. Hans, Associate Professor of German Studies, Wellesley College,and author of Gender and the Uncanny in Films of the Weimar Republic)«Excavating a rich, diverse trove of historical sources – from journalism, psychology,and criminology to literature and film – Dr. Hales’s cultural history of women andthe occult in Weimar Germany exposes a shadowy and little-explored realm ofanxiety, pleasure, and power around the rise of the New Woman.» (Valerie Weinstein, Associate Professor of Women’s, Gender, and SexualityStudies and Niehoff Professor in Film and Media Studies, University ofCincinnati, and author of Antisemitism in Film Comedy in Nazi Germany)