Hester Baer is Associate Professor of German at the University of Maryland, where she also serves as a core faculty member in the Film Studies program. Baer’s research interests focus on gender and sexuality in film and media; historical and contemporary feminisms; and German literature and culture in the 21st Century. She is the author of Dismantling the Dream Factory: Gender, German Cinema, and the Postwar Quest for a New Film Language (Berghahn Books, 2009); the guest editor of a special issue of the journal Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature entitled “Contemporary Women’s Writing and the Return of Feminism in Germany” (2011); and the co-editor with Alexandra Merley Hill of German Women’s Writing in the 21st Century (2014). She is currently working on a new book that rethinks the history of German cinema from 1980-2010. Recent publications connected to this project include “Das Boot and the German Cinema of Neoliberalism,” which appeared in German Quarterly(2012) and “Affectless Economies: The Berlin School and Neoliberalism” published in Discourse (2013). Baer received her Ph.D. in German from Washington University in St. Louis, where she also earned a graduate certificate in Women’s Studies. From 2002 until 2013 she was a faculty member in German and Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Oklahoma, where she was named Associates Second Century Presidential Professor. She has served on the Steering Committee of Women in German and as the President of the South Central Modern Language Association. Baer served as President of Women in German from 2012-2014.