Mary Beth Stein

mary beth stein picture

Mary Beth Stein

Associate Professor of German, Director of German Literature


Contact:

Office Phone: (202) 994-6896
Columbian College of Arts & Sciences 801 22nd Street, NW, 509F Washington DC 20052

Mary Beth Stein came to GWU in 1997. After receiving her Ph.D. from Indiana University in 1993, she taught at Haverford and Carleton Colleges. She has published articles on subjects ranging from folklore and fairy tales, to Berlin, the Berlin Wall, German film and East German memory culture. Her current book project examines the life histories of East Germans before and after the fall of the Wall. Her primary teaching and research interests are in the areas of German cultural studies, Berlin and literature of the 19th and 20th centuries. Supported by a prestigious Fulbright Senior Scholar grant, Professor Stein spent the 2000-2001 academic year teaching at the Humboldt University of Berlin and doing research in the Stasi Archives. She received GW's Bender Teaching Award in 2002 and was a Mount Vernon Faculty Fellow in 2018-2019.

 


  • “Man Without a Face: The Autobiographical Self-Fashioning of Spymaster Markus Wolf,” pp. 71-98. In: Valentina Glajar and Allison Lewis (eds.), Cold War Spy Stories. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2019.
  • “Narratives of Stasi Detention: Memory and History at the Berlin-Hohenschoenhausen Memorial Museum," pp. 231-254. In: Narrative Culture 3/2 (2016)
  • “Post-Socialism in Post-revolutionary Perspective,” In: Anke Stephan and Julia Obertreis (eds.), Erinnerungen nach der Wende: Oral History und (Post)sozialistische Gesellschaften/Remembering after the Fall of Communism: Oral History and (Post)-socialist Societies, pp. 255-262. Essen: Klartext Verlag, 2009.
  • “The Stasi With a Human Face? Ambiguity in Florian von Donnersmarck’s The Lives of Others,” German Studies Review XXXI no. 3 (2008): 567-579