The Women in German Dissertation Prize comes out of the Women in German Memorial Fund. This Fund was established in memory of those of our members who have died and whose presence and participation in WiG we want to commemorate in an active way each year. In 1997 we established this Dissertation Prize in their memory. It is now completing its third year.
Dissertations written by a WiG member that have been completed and filed in the preceding academic year are eligible, provided they are consonant with our mission statement. To be considered, a dissertation can be nominated either by the candidate herself or by her dissertation director or another faculty member familiar with her work.
The chair of the Dissertation Prize committee forwards the manuscripts to a panel of three judges. The judges select the prize winner and the award is given at the annual Women in German conference. For the 1999 contest, the judges were Professor Helen Cafferty (Bowdoin College), Professor Nancy Kaiser (University of Wisconsin-Madison), and Professor Susanne Zantop (Dartmouth College). I, Angelika Bammer (Emory University), was the committee chair.
The 1999 award for the best dissertation by a WiG member was given to Temby Caprio from the University of Chicago for her dissertation entitled "Womenís Film Culture in the Federal Republic of Germany: Female Spectators, Politics and Pleasure from the Fifties to the Nineties." On behalf of the Women in German Prize Committee and the collective membership of Women in German, I, as chair of the Committee, congratulate Temby on this award. I also extend our appreciation and thanks to Tembyís Doktormutter, Professor Katie Trumpener of the Department of Germanic Studies at the University of Chicago, for her exemplary mentoring and guidance.
In her nominating letter Katie Trumpener describes Tembyís dissertation as follows:
[Temby Caprio's dissertation] is nothing less than a new (and badly-needed) history of women and cinema in Germany. Beginning with the culture and reception of womenís films and womenís filmmaking throughout the 40s and 50s, the dissertation goes on to describe the emergence of early feminist culture in West Germany, the films shaped from its discussions and debates, their impact and implications for art cinema and for more mainstream film culture, and finally the partial survival of such feminist paradigms in the self-consciously post-feminist films of the 1990s.
Temby's work reopens a number of extremely important questions first raised in Germany (but never resolved) in the early years of feminist film scholarship. She is especially interested in the questions of the womenís picture, of womenís stake in "conventional", "normative" melodramas, of the role, more generally, played by womenís magazines, and the womenís press, in the reception of post-war German cinema, and of what kind of impact rearly feminist filmmaking actually had on mainstream women filmgoers.
And this is how the judges described their reasons for their selection of Temby Caprio's dissertation for the 1999 award:
Temby Caprio's "Women's Film Culture in the Federal Republic of Germany: Female Spectators, Politics and Pleasure from the Fifties to the Ninetimes" makes a fundamental contribution to the history of postwar cinema as well as to the history of feminist culture in the Federal Republic. Investigating the history of womenís cinema in the FRG as the history of womenís film culture, Caprio redesigns accepted paradigms of research. Her project is both broad in scope and nuanced in interpretive analysis. Theoretically sophisticated and methodologically circumspect, Caprio combines analysis of social structure with a sensitivity to aesthetic concerns. Well versed in relevant scholarly discussions in both English and German, she has written a well-crafted dissertation that is a pleasure to read. Her work is historically grounded and differentiated in its analyses. It incorporates new material as well as provocative investigations of more canonical films within the framework of a history of womenís film culture that does justice to contradictions and discontinuities as well as common structures and negotiations.
For those of you interested in reading "the real thing," you will be happy to know that an article based on Tembyís work in this dissertation is about to appear in the forthcoming issue of the Women in German Yearbook.
As a matter of fact, the Women in German Dissertation Award is Temby Caprio's second academic award: In her first year of teaching she received one of the few teaching awards given to graduate students at the University of Chicago, one in which undergraduate students nominate a particularly excellent and inspiring teacher. Before and beyond awards, however, Tembyís dedication to her work in all its facets is evident in the fact that, in addition to her work as a scholar and a teacher, she has been an active participant in the practical work of supporting and expanding feminist film culture, locally and globally, over the past five years.
We are proud and happy to be able to support work such as this through our organization. Congratulations, Temby. As my daughter would put it: You go, girl!