Ph.D. Cornell UniversityResearch Interests: Film and media studies, German literature, Intellectual history

Currently the Director of the Davis Humanities Institute, Jaimey Fisher is Professor of German and Cinema & Digital Media.

Education and Background

Jaimey Fisher studied German literature and thought at Stanford University, at the Freie Universität Berlin, and at Cornell University, where he received his Ph.D. with an emphasis in German intellectual history as well as in Film and Video Studies. Before coming to Davis in 2004, Prof. Fisher taught at Tulane University as an Assistant Professor of German. His primary research and teaching interests include film and media studies, German literature, and intellectual history. 

Publications (selected)

Prof. Fisher is the author of two books: Christian Petzold (University of Illinois, 2013) and Disciplining Germany: Youth, Reeducation, and Reconstruction after the Second World War (Wayne State University, 2007). He has also edited or co-edited four books, including, on film: Generic Histories of German Cinema: Genre and its Deviations (2013, Camden House, Screen series), and Collapse of the Conventional: German Cinema and its Politics at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century (2010, Wayne State University), as well as on literature and theory: Spatial Turns: Space, Place, and Mobility in German Literary and Visual Culture (2010, Rodopi) and Critical Theory: Current State and Future Prospects (2001, Berghahn).

He has also published over 30 articles and book chapters, in the journals New German Critique, The German Quarterly, Seminar, Iris, The Goethe Yearbook, and Zeitschrift für Germanistik, among others. He is currently working on a study of German war films from the first half of the twentieth century.

Teaching

Prof. Fisher teaches courses at UC Davis in German and Cinema and Digital Media, on topics ranging from Bertolt Brecht to contemporary European cinema. He has also developed a summer-abroad course for UC Davis, entitled “World Cinema and the European Film Festival,” which is based in Berlin but travels to the Locarno Film Festival in southern Switzerland/northern Italy. At UC Davis, Prof. Fisher is an affiliated faculty member in Critical Theory, Cultural Studies, Performance Studies, and Jewish Studies.

Awards and Fellowships

He has held two fellowships from the German Academic Exchange Service (the DAAD) and was awarded a Federal Chancellor (Bundeskanzler or Buka) Fellowship from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.