Sophie Holzberger, M.A.

Academic Staff

 

Sophie Anna Holzberger studied Comparative Literature and Art History at University of Munich (LMU) and King’s College London and earned her Master’s degree in Film Studies at Freie Universität Berlin. She was a DAAD Graduate Student Fellow at NYU’s Department of German for the academic year 2019/2020.

She has worked at film festivals, in film production and as an editorial assistant for the edition 17 on feminism and film of the magazine Nach dem Film. Between 2018 and 2021 she worked as a student assistant for Professor Sabine Nessel (Film Studies, Freie Universität Berlin). She is currently conducting her PhD research as an academic staff member at the working unit Everyday Media and Digital Cultures at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz.

Her PhD project is interested in a relational historiography of West German film in which she examines collaborative dimensions of feminist filmmaking as political practice. It focuses on activist filmmaking from different feminist movements in the West German context, including the so-called women’s movement and radical lesbian feminism from the 1970s and the Black queer feminism of the 1980s and 1990s.
By centering films that are not considered part of the German feminist archive and conceptualizing film production and distribution networks as intimate and affective political labor, the focus of my work is twofold: it aims to broaden film studies’ concept of political film while questioning notions of a singular and white feminist history in Germany.