I am Assistant Professor of German Studies at the University of British Columbia. Prior to my appointment at UBC, I served as Assistant Professor of German and Coordinator of the German Program at Sam Houston State University. I received my Ph.D. in Germanic Languages and Literatures and Film & Media Studies at Washington University in St. Louis (2015) and hold a B.A. (2007) and M.A. (2009) in German Studies from the University of Illinois at Chicago.

I specialize in late-18th- to 21st-century German media and cultural history. My research focuses on 19th-century literature, film and media cultures, and queer studies. This work variously engages scholarship in affect, narrative, and queer theory. I am also invested in critical approaches to German studies as vital modes of humanities and language study advocacy. You can find an updated list of publications here. 

I believe in scholarly collectives! To this end, I have co-founded several research and advocacy networks. In 2016, I co-founded and am currently steering committee member of the international scholarly collective “Diversity, Decolonization, and the German Curriculum” (DDGC). Since the 2020 conference, "The Pasts and Futures of Queer German Studies," which I co-organized with Kyle Frackman (UBC), I've been part of an unofficial network devised to advance queer and trans German studies. Finally, in 2021, I co-founded the CES Cinema Studies Network, which seeks to highlight the work of scholars and students with interest in Central, Eastern, and Southern European cinema cultures. 

I serve on the editorial boards of Studies in Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Literature, Feminist German Studies, and the Women, Gender and Sexuality in German Literature and Culture series. My work has been funded by Fulbright, the DAAD, SSHRC, the UBC Hampton Grant, among other. 

My personal background: I was born into a Muslim family in the former Yugoslavia. My family fled the Bosnian war. We were refugees in Germany before moving to the USA—a move "inspired" by German residency visa restrictions. I am a queer scholar. 

Current Projects
  • a book examining the influence of fluctuating literary markets on authorial agency and narrative form provisionally titled Fragile Poetics: Industrial Print, Precarity, and Literary Form.
  • a book on Richard Oswald's 1919 film Anders als die Andern (Different from the Others) for McGill-Queen's University Press' "Queer Film Classics" series.
  • two special issues on queer German studies.
  • articles or book chapters on realism, occult techniques as mode for cinematic intimacy, pleasure and queer cinema, and cinematic repose.
  • a conference on critical approaches to language and culture studies program outcomes and assessments.
  • an undergraduate journal in German studies: Augenblick. 

You can find me on twitter @ervinmalakaj. ​