Bio

Agnes Mueller (M.A., LMU Munich, Germany; Ph.D., Vanderbilt), Professor, is an expert on recent and contemporary German literature. She is core faculty in Jewish Studies and in Comparative Literature and affiliated with Women's and Gender Studies. Her essay publications are on German American relations, contemporary literature, German Jewish studies, and Holocaust memory. Her 2004 anthology German Pop Culture: How "American" Is It? (U of Michigan P) is widely used for teaching and research. Her most recently published monograph is entitled The Inability to Love: Jews, Gender, and America in Recent German Literature, available in German translation as Die Unfähigkeit zu lieben. With Katja Garloff she edited German Jewish Literature After 1990 (Camden House, 2018). Her new book, Holocaust Migration in German Jewish Literatures (forthcoming with Cambridge UP) reveals how, in recent German Jewish literature, Jewish and Muslim migration stories converge to shape the future of Holocaust memory.

In Spring of 2025 she was the Carol Kahn Strauss Fellow in Jewish Studies at the American Academy in Berlin.  

Podcasts

• Migration Stories; The Evolution of German-Jewish Identity
• Jennifer Frey, host: “Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice with Agnes Mueller.” Sacred and Profane Love. Episode 29.  December 31, 2020.
• Passport Playlist DJs, hosts: “An Interview with Dr. Agnes Mueller.” Passport Playlist. Episode 6. March 27, 2019.
• Curtis Rogers, host: “Global Studies with Dr. Agnes Mueller.” Library Voices SC. Podcast of the South Carolina State Library. Episode 51. May 24, 2018.

Agnes Mueller in the News

• Exploring Immigrant Identity Beyond Stereotypes
• German professor receives prestigious Berlin Prize fellowship
• Agnes Mueller has been chosen as a Berlin Prize Fellow of the American Academy for Spring, 2025
• Prof. Mueller Chairs panel at the August Jewish Museum
• Teaching Pandemics in Literature
• Essay about Religion and Pandemics