Julie Koser

Julie Koser is Associate Professor in the Department of German Studies. She specializes in 18th- and early 19th-century German literature and culture with a focus on issues of gender and representation in the "Goethezeit." She is affiliate faculty in The Harriet Tubman Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. She served as Department Head and Director of Graduate studies from 2019 to 2025 and as Undergraduate Program Director from 2012 to 2019. 

Her research and teaching interests span from the 18th to the 21st centuries and include the construction and dissolution of gender myths; the interplay between gender, national identity, and citizenship; gender and warfare; literary and visual depictions of women and violence; issues of alterity; travel writing; the postcolonial Enlightenment; and the early historical novel. Her book Armed Ambiguity: Women Warriors in German Literature and Culture in the Age of Goethe (Northwestern University Press, 2016) explores the destabilizing effects and cultural ambivalence evoked by the juxtaposition of women with violence. Her current book project engages with questions of identity and belonging raised by literary constructions of the "Orient" in the fictional works of Benedikte Naubert.

She regularly teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on issues in 18th-century German literature and culture, such as gender and warfare, German theater and drama, postcolonial Enlightenment, criminals and outsiders, death and desire, and fairy tales. She also teaches courses on translation theory and transcription of German scripts (such as Fraktur, Kurrentschrift and Sütterlin).