Department Personnel : Susan Derwin, Graduate Advisor

[Faculty] [Affiliated Faculty] [Staff & Advisors] [Emeriti]

Susan Derwin received her Ph.D. in comparative literature from the Johns Hopkins University in 1988. She taught at the University of Arizona in the Dept. of English before coming to UCSB, where she is a member of the Germanic, Slavic and Semitic Studies Department and an affiliate of the English Department and the Comparative Literature Program, which she chaired for eight years.

Her teaching and research interests include holocaust and violence studies, psychoanalytic approaches to literature, and nineteenth- and twentieth-century narrative, with an emphasis upon testimony, autobiography and memoir.

She is the author of The Ambivalence of Form: Lukács, Freud and the Novel (Johns Hopkins UP, 1992), and essays on Mark Twain, M.F.K. Fischer, Sigmund Freud, David Lynch, Holocaust denial, the Los Angeles Museum of Tolerance, and other topics.

Presently, she is completing a book-length manuscript entitled “Holocaust Narrative: The Rage that Never Was,” and which includes essays on Primo Levi, Saul Friedlaender, the Binjamin Wikomirski affair, and two films: Liliana Cavani’s “The Night Porter,” and Roberto Benigni’s “Life is Beautiful.”

Recent and upcoming graduate courses include: “Trauma, Memory, Historiography,” “Holocaust, Memory, Narrative,” “Representing Torture,” and “Narrative, Psychoanalysis and the Human Subject.”

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