Birgit Dahlke

Dr. Birgit Dahlke is a Professor at the Department of German, College of Arts and Sciences, Georgetown University. She holds broad-ranging expertise in modern and contemporary German literature, with specific focuses on gender and canonization, life writing, interdependencies of race, gender and age, German unification, and literary/cultural life of East(ern) Germany.

Her educational background includes a PhD in German Literature from Freie Universität Berlin (1994) and a Higher Doctorate (Habilitation) from Humboldt University Berlin (2003). She has taught internationally at institutions in Berlin, Urbana-Champaign (Illinois), Nottingham (UK), Newcastle (UK), and Toulouse (France).

Her major publications include books on underground women's poetry of the GDR (1997), youth and masculinity around 1900 (2006), and a biography of East German poet Wolfgang Hilbig (2011). Her research explores the sociocultural dimensions of German literature across historical periods.