Maria-Regina Kecht

What Maria-Regina Kecht, Associate Professor in the department, likes best about Rice is the students. “They are analytical, intellectually curious, and smart,” she says. Most recently she supervised two Dunlevie writing projects. “Both students had attended my freshman seminar on German film. They were awarded a Dunlevie Fellowship and composed really exciting essays on the ideological context of German Rubble films in the late 1940s.” Currently, Professor Kecht is working on a book about Vienna that explores the complex system of urban signification constituting the “personality” of the city. Very active in the profession, Kecht was also the editor of Modern Austrian Literature (2005-8), and recently published a highly influential article on Elfriede Jelinek’s Die Kinder der Toten (in M. P. Konzett und M. Lamb-Faffelberger, eds., Elfriede Jelinek: Writing Woman, Nation, and Identity, Dickinson UP, 2007), which has been discussed on many conferences and is about to become a standard work in Jelinek research.