Abstract:
This book is a Festschrift in honor of Ruth-Ellen Boetcher Joeres, written by
several former graduate students, whom she supervised over her years as
professor of German Studies at the University of Minnesota, and some of her
colleagues and collaborators. The book pays tribute to Joeres’s influence on the
German Studies profession as well as to her influence on the contributors’ lives
and the feminist choices they have made. Dr. Joeres is known for her feminist
scholarly contributions to women’s writing in the eighteenth and nineteenth
century, including her book "Respectability and Deviance: Nineteenth-Century
German Women Writers and the Ambiguity of Representation" (U of Chicago
Press, 1998), and her collaborative feminist editing practices as editor of both
"Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society" and the "Women in German
Yearbook." Together with Angelika Bammer, she edited a volume "On the Future of
Scholarly Writing: Critical Interventions" (Palgrave MacMillan, 2015) that
navigates the terrain of academic writing practices and calls for a focus not only
on what scholars write but on how they write it. Because of her critical
interventions in the realm of academia in general and feminist studies and
German studies, in particular, as well as her influence on the lives of the next
generations, this book will be of interest beyond those who know her personally.