Inka Mülder-Bach
Inka Mülder-Bach is Professor emeritus of German and Comparative Literature at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich (LMU) and was a Permanent Visiting Faculty Member of the German Department from 2012 to 2020. She studied German, English and Skandinavian literature, and philosophy at Tübingen, Oslo and Berkeley (Promotion 1985, Habilitation 1994), and has taught and researched at various institutions, including the Freie Universität Berlin, Columbia University, the Zentrum für Literaturforschung (Berlin), the Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf, the New York University and the IFK (Vienna). In 2008/09 and 2010/11, she held an LMU Excellence-in-Research professorship, and from 2009 to 2010, she served as vice president of the LMU. In 2013 she received the Federal Cross of Merit.
Her research and teaching comprises German literature in a comparative perspective from the 18th to the 20th century, aesthetics, poetics, and cultural theory. Recent work has focussed on genre theory, small narrative forms, theory of prose and Robert Musil. She has served and is serving as speaker or principle investigator in a number of interdisciplinary research projects, among them “Beginnings in/of Modernity” (Research Unit), “Functions of Literature in Processes of Globalization” (Research Training Group), “Mimesis” (International Doctoral Program) and “Philology of Adventure” (Research Unit).
In addition to a wide range of articles and essays Inka Mülder-Bach has written and edited numerous books, among them the monographs Siegfried Kracauer. Grenzgänger zwischen Theorie und Literatur (1985), Im Zeichen Pygmalions. Das Modell der Statue nud die Entdeckung der “Darstellung” im 18. Jahrhundert (1998), and Robert Musil. Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften. Ein Versuch über den Roman (2013); her most recent book publications include the coedited volumes Was der Fall ist. Casus und Lapsus (2015) and Prosa schreiben. Literatur – Geschichte – Recht (2019). She is chief editor of the Werke of Siegfried Kracauer (Suhrkamp Verlag, 9 volumes, 2004-2012), and coeditor of the journal POETICA.
