Malynne Sternstein

Malynne Sternstein is an Associate Professor at the University of Chicago since 1996. She holds a PhD from the University of Chicago (1996) and specializes in 20th/21st-century Central and East European Studies, Film, Avant-Garde Studies, and Social/Political Theory. Her research engages with authors like Kafka, Kundera, Foucault, and filmmakers from the Czech New Wave, exploring themes of dark humor, psychogeography, and legal discourses.

Her academic work includes studies on Nabokov's eidetic imagination, Lacanian psychoanalysis in horror cinema, and the historical exploitation of 'hooliganism' in Eastern Europe. She has published monographs on Czech avant-garde movements and Chicagoland Czech communities, alongside essays in journals like Modernism/Modernity.

Sternstein teaches courses on Kafka, Nabokov, Czech cinema, and critical theory. She advises student theses on topics ranging from film analysis to hip hop and anxiety studies. Though her current projects span diverse disciplines—from Cold War cinema to legal theory—her work consistently interrogates the boundaries of belief, power, and cultural representation.