Ervin Malakaj
Assistant Professor
Central, Eastern & Northern European Studies
Faculty of Arts
Research Themes: Language, Sustainability and Transnationalism
Dr. Malakaj is an Assistant Professor of German Studies and an affiliate faculty member of the Institute for European Studies.
Dr. Malakaj holds a B.A. and M.A. in German Studies from the University of Illinois in Chicago as well as a Ph.D. in German with a secondary specialization in Film & Media Studies from Washington University in St. Louis.
Prior to his appointment at UBC he served as Assistant Professor of German and Coordinator of the German Program at Sam Houston State University.
Research Interests
Dr. Malakaj specializes in late-18th- to 21st-century German media and cultural history. His research focuses on 19th-century literary cultures, film history, narrative theory, queer theory, critical pedagogy, and humanities as well as language study advocacy.
Dr. Malakaj is currently writing a book examining the influence of fluctuating literary markets on authorial agency and narrative form provisionally titled Fragile Literary Cultures in Early Imperial Germany. Part and parcel of this research is his work on a volume titled Writing for the Literary Market in the Long Nineteenth Century (co-edited with Vance Byrd).
Scholarship in film studies includes a second book project, which will examine the primacy of melodramatic form in the articulation of queer experiences in popular culture and the intellectual sphere of Weimar Germany. In addition, Dr. Malakaj is editing a volume provisionally titled Slapstick: An Interdisciplinary Companion (co-edited with Alena Lyons and under advanced contract with de Gruyter).
In 2016, Dr. Malakaj co-founded the international scholarly collective “Diversity, Decolonialization, and the German Curriculum” (DDGC). Together with Regine Criser he is editing Diversity and Decolonization in German Studies, a volume that grew out of the work of DDGC (in production and forthcoming with Palgrave). Dr. Malakaj also serves as the co-editor of DDGC’s official blog.
