Kristopher Imbrigotta
Associate Professor, German Studies
Prof. Imbrigotta is chair of German Studies and also sits on the executive committee for Environmental Sciences and Studies. His research and teaching cover literature and cultural studies from the late nineteenth century to today, focusing primarily on: theatre history, performance, and drama pedagogy; environmental arts and humanities; media and film; and memory discourses. He serves as editor for the well-established monograph series German Life and Civilization (Peter Lang). Since 2019 he has been a coordinator of the Interdisciplinary Teaching Network of the German Studies Association and is a founding member of the German Studies Collaboratory, a digital humanities open-resource teaching/research hub. From 2016-2023 he served as co-editor of the performance journal Communications of the International Brecht Society. He is the author of the critical student edition of Bertolt Brecht's Caucasian Chalk Circle (Bloomsbury, 2021). He was also a member of the international translation team for the newest edition of Brecht on Theater (Bloomsbury, 2014). At Puget Sound, Prof. Imbrigotta directs the faculty-led summer program to Berlin in conjunction with the Connections course "Finding Germany: Memory, History, and Identity in Berlin”; and is also co-director of the university’s long standing faculty exchange with the University of Passau.
His work has appeared in various book volumes as well as in Radical History Review, German Quarterly, Brecht Yearbook, Expressionismus, Monatshefte, Humanities-Net, and Translation and Literature. Prof. Imbrigotta regularly presents work, gives invited talks, and organizes panels at national and international conferences. In summer 2025, he will co-organize the 18th Symposium of the International Brecht Society in British Columbia under the topic: “Brecht in the Anthropocene: Nature / Environment / Naturalness / Earth / Animals / Humans”.
With Elena Pnevmonidou (University of Victoria) he coordinates Humanities for the Anthropocene, an international cross-disciplinary collective of scholars, activists, educators, artists, and practitioners focused on pressing issues in the environmental arts & humanities. This group seeks to redefine the contours of arts & humanities disciplines, asking new questions, developing new aspirations, and repositioning established disciplines in new ways, so that arts & humanities work can constitute a more meaningful, impactful, and transformative response to the many intersecting and deepening global planetary crises.
Future projects include: 1) a co-edited anthology Brecht and Ecocriticism: Theories, Readings, Applications, (Camden House, forthcoming); 2) a co-edited journal issue on memory discourses and colonialism; and 3) a larger-scale project investigating representations of nature, ecology, and socialism in 1980s East German DEFA films.
Prof. Imbrigotta is the recipient of the Thomas A. Davis Faculty Award for Excellence in Teaching, and a John Lantz Senior Fellowship for Research/Advanced Study.