Anne Bertram

Anne holds a BA in British Studies as well as a BA and MA in American Studies from the University of Leipzig. During her studies she received funding from the Studienstiftung des Deutschen Volkes, worked as an instructor and research assistant at the Institute for American Studies in Leipzig, and as a social media manager for the German-American Institute Saxony. Her research interests are located in the realm of popular culture and film studies, predominantly centering on displays of femininity and contemporary renditions of regional Gothic.

Project: Imaginings of White Femininity in Contemporary Iterations of Sentimental Southern Gothic Visual Culture (WT)

Recent years have seen an increase and revival of a Southern Gothic aesthetic on social media platforms and in US film. At the core of this visual culture is the commodified staging of untouched nature, abandoned buildings, Christian symbolism, and young white women. In my dissertation project, I explore how this aesthetic is permeated by the sentimental and which dominant myths about US-American society are reproduced and worked through in these cultural products. My aim is to develop the concept of a ‘sentimental Southern Gothic’ which is centered around the therein contained narratives and imaginings of white femininity. On a theoretical level, the intricacies and the tying together of research on the sentimental as well as the Gothic mode is decisive and further intertwined with perspectives from regionalism, affect, hauntology and nostalgia studies. The cultural work of the ’sentimental Southern Gothic‘ is then to be captured and decoded through a discourse analysis of social media content and film. By uncovering how products of this specific visual culture construct and promote an image of a supposedly apolitical and ahistorical US South, my dissertation project seeks to make a critical contribution to existing understandings of the sentimental as an aesthetic narrative strategy.