Susan Funkenstein (Ph.D. 2001), a student of Prof. Emerita Barbara C. Buenger, has published Marking Modern Movement: Dance and Gender in the Visual Imagery of the Weimar Republic. Susan is currently a lecturer at the Penny W. Stamps School of Art & Design at the University of Michigan, where she has worked since Fall 2014. At Stamps, Susan teaches large academic courses in history, theory, and criticism in art and design.
Marking Modern Movement looks behind the razzle dazzle of visual depictions and experiences of dance in the Weimar Republic (1918–33) to one far more complex involving issues of gender and the body during a tumultuous period in German history. The images copiously illustrated and analyzed in Marking Modern Movement illuminate how visual artists and dancers befriended one another and collaborated together. In many ways because of these bonds, artists and dancers forged a new path in which images revealed artists’ deep understanding of dance, their dynamic engagement with popular culture, and out of that, a possibility of representing women dancers as cultural authorities to be respected. Through six case studies, Marking Modern Movement explores how and why these complex dynamics occurred in ways specific to their historical moment. A clearly written scholarly book accessible to general readers and undergraduates, Marking Modern Movement converses across German studies, art history, dance studies, gender studies, and popular culture studies, and is published in the Social History, Popular Culture, and Politics in Germany Series, a showcase for interdisciplinary scholarship in German studies at the University of Michigan Press.