Barbara Becker-Cantarino

Barbara Becker-Cantarino is Research Professor in the Humanities at Ohio State University. She has taught at the University of Texas and Indiana University. Her research interests include Early Modern German Culture and Literature, Women’s History and Literature, and Gender and Sexuality Studies.

She is the author of numerous books and articles. Her books include Der lange Weg zur Mündigkeit: Frau und Literatur in Deutschland 1500-1800 (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1987 and 1989); Schriftstellerinnen der Romantik. Epoche – Werke – Wirkung (Munich: Beck, 2000); The Eighteenth Century. Enlightenment and Sentimentality (Rochester: Boydell & Brewer 2005); Pietism and Women’s Autobiography (University of Chicago Press, 2005); Meine Liebe zu Büchern. Sophie von La Roche als professionelle Schriftstellerin (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag, 2008); and Genderforschung und Germanistik (Berlin: Weidler, 2010). Her current projects are "Sexuality and Gender in German Romanticism" and a study of diaries and letters of German migrants and missionaries to Ohio in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

In addition to her Guggenheim Fellowship, she has received a number of grants, fellowships, and awards from the National Endowment for the Humanities and  the DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service). She was a Fulbright Senior Fellow in Dresden (1998) and a recipient of the Humboldt Research Prize (1990). She has served on the editorial boards of PMLA, the Lessing Yearbook, the Goethe-Yearbook, among others, and is a co-editor of the journal Daphnis. Zeitschrift für Mittlere Deutsche Literatur. She has lectured widely in the U.S. and Europe, held visiting professorships at the Free University of Berlin, at Graz (Austria), Wroclaw (Poland), and at Oxford University. She has organized several international conferences and is planning a Humboldt Kolleg "Migrations and Germany" for October 2010 at the Ohio State University.