Lilla Balint specializes in postwar and contemporary German literature, culture, and critical thought, with an emphasis on post-1989 literary production. Her research is transnational and comparative in orientation, focusing on the long history of narrative forms, from the novel to emergent forms of digital writing; literary and narrative theory; aesthetics and politics; and critical theory.
Balint is currently completing her book manuscript, “After 1989: History, Temporality, and the Contemporary,” that attends to questions of aesthetic form to theorize ideas of historicity that emerge in literature from Central Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The comparative study traces writers’ engagement with and resistance to narratives such as the end of history, presentism, and the Anthropocene. Balint’s writing has appeared in Critical Quarterly, German Quarterly, Gegenwartsliteratur: A German Studies Yearbook, Studies in Twentieth & Twenty-First Century Literature, Telos, among others.
Other projects include an edited volume on German author Judith Schalansky for text+kritik (with Leonhard Herrmann), forthcoming in fall 2024. As the first journal-length engagement with Schalansky’s multi-faceted oeuvre as writer, book designer, and book series editor, the volume comprises essays on topics ranging from extinction and the Anthropocene to historicity and the materiality of the book. Balint’s other editorial project (with Arne Höcker) is a special issue on contemporary literature that examines the contemporary not primarily as a temporal phenomenon but as a textual and critical practice. Invested in the public humanities, Balint has organized and moderated events with various authors for San Francisco’s literary festival LitQuake, the Goethe Institute, the German Historical Institute in Washington, D.C., and the Archives of Migration series at UC Berkeley’s Department of German.
Balint’s research has been supported by the Hellman Family Foundation; the Humanities Research Fellowship; and the Townsend Center for the Humanities at UC Berkeley. At Berkeley, Balint is also affiliated with the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, the Center for Jewish Studies, and the Institute for European Studies.
Balint received her Ph.D. in German Studies from Stanford University. Before joining the faculty at Berkeley, she held faculty appointments in the Department of German and Russian at Vanderbilt University and at Hamilton College.
Lilla Balint specializes in postwar and contemporary German literature, culture, and critical thought, with an emphasis on post-1989 literary production. Her research is transnational and comparative in orientation, focusing on the long history of narrative forms, from the novel to emergent forms of digital writing; literary and narrative theory; aesthetics and politics; and critical theory.