Stephan Jaeger

• GRMN 1310 - Love in German Culture in English Translation
• GRMN 2520 - Spies: Stories of Secret Agents, Treason, and Surveillance (in English translation)
• GRMN 3262 - Representations of the Holocaust in English Translation
• GRMN 3390 - German Representations of War in English Translation
• GRMN 4600 - Senior Seminar in German Studies
• GRMN 7200 - German Literary and Cultural Theory
• GRMN 7360 - Immersive and Digital Storytelling in History Museums (special topics course)

Dr. Stephan Jaeger is Professor of German Studies and Head of the Department of German and Slavic Studies at the University of Manitoba (Winnipeg, Canada). He came to the University of Manitoba in 2004 after teaching and researching at the universities of Bielefeld, Gießen (both Germany), Szczecin (Poland), Wisconsin-Madison and Colorado-Boulder (both USA). He is an expert in German Studies as well as comparative transnational memory studies. He researches and has published widely on contemporary narratives, representations and memory of war and genocide in German and European museums, literature, film and historiography. He has held numerous national and international research grant and awards, organized a dozen of international conferences and awards and published 3 authored monographs, co-edited 10 books, and authored more than 70 book chapters and journal articles on museum narratives and experience, relations between literature and historiography/history, poetics and narratology of historical writing and representations of war and Holocaust, among others. He is the co-editor of the De Gruyter book series “Museums and Narrative” and co-coordinator of the Working Group “Museums and Memory” of the Memory Studies Association. 

• PhD, Universität Bielefeld (Germany), 1999
• 1st Staatsexamen (Erste Staatsprüfung für das Lehramt der Sekundarstufen II/I – degree in professional teaching) in German and English, Universität Bielefeld (Germany), 1995

Research interests

• Museum narratives and transnational cultural memory studies
• Experience and emotions in contemporary museums
• Representations of war and of the Holocaust
• German, European, and transnational representations of the First World War & the Second World War
• Poetics and narratology of historical writing

Research summary

Dr. Jaeger’s current research is deeply located in transnational museum and memory studies with a particular emphasis on the analysis of Holocaust, war and refugee/migration exhibitions. How do museum representations steer or inspire critical learning and thinking, establish or defend ethical value systems and how do they steer emotional reaction of visitors in their spatial surroundings? A particular emphasis lies on German cultural memory in a transnational context and questions how learning about the past merges with contemporary relevance for the visitors’ present and future. Current research projects discuss questions of immersion, empathy/emotion, storytelling, experientiality and empirical visitor-impact in historical exhibitions, as well as how museums can represent aspects of collaboration and perpetration.

Research affiliations/groups

• Co-editor - De Gruyter book series “Museums and Narrative"
• Co-coordinator - “Museums & Memory” Working Group of the Memory Studies Association
• Editorial Board member - online journal and forum Digital Memory Dialogues

• Stephan Jaeger and James Bulgin, eds. “The New Holocaust Galleries at the Imperial War Museum London: Conception, Design, Interpretation.” Museums and Narrative 3. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2025.
• Kerstin Barndt and Stephan Jaeger, eds. "Museums, Narratives, and Critical Histories: Narrating the Past for the Present and Future." Museums and Narrative 1. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2024.
• Stephan Jaeger. "The Second World War in the Twenty-First-Century Museum: From Memory, Narrative, and Experience to Experientiality." Media and Cultural Memory 26. Berlin / Boston: De Gruyter, [Hardcover and Ebook], Paperback 2022. 368 pp. (xiv+354).
• Stephan Jaeger [in print]: “Challenging the Museum Visitor? Complicity and Perpetration during and beyond the Second World War in Contemporary Museum Exhibitions.” Perpetration and Complicity under Nazism and Beyond: Compromised Identities? Ed. Mary Fulbrook, Bastiaan Willems, Stephanie Bird, and Stefanie Rauch. London: Bloomsbury, 2023. 237-251.
• Stephan Jaeger. “Visitor Emotions, Experientiality, Holocaust, and Human Rights: TripAdvisor Responses to the Topography of Terror (Berlin) and the Kazerne Dossin (Mechelen).” Understanding Visitor Experience at Holocaust Memorials and Museums, ed. Diana I. Popescu, Routledge, 2023. 31-45.
• Stephan Jaeger. “Ambiguous Narratives of World War Technologies in Contemporary Military History Museums.” Journal of Educational Media, Memory and Society, special Issue “Places of Progress? Technology Museums as Contested Sites of Education,” eds. Daniel Brandau and Christian Kehrt, 14.1 (2022): 33-54.
• Jörg Echternkamp and Stephan Jaeger, eds. "Views of Violence: Representing the Second World War in German and European Museums and Memorials." Spektrum: Publications from the German Studies Association 19. New York: Berghahn Books, 2019 [Hardcover and Ebook], Paperback 2022. 283 pages.
• Daniel Fulda and Stephan Jaeger, eds., in collaboration with Elena Agazzi. "Romanhaftes Erzählen von Geschichte: Vergegenwärtigte Vergangenheiten im beginnenden 21." Jahrhundert. Ed. Studien und Texte zur Sozialgeschichte der Literatur 148. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2019. 519 pp. (vii + 502 pp.).
• Stephan Jaeger and Susanne Vees-Gulani, eds. Special Issue of Seminar: A Journal of Germanic Studies. 50.1 (February 2014), "Representations of War Experiences from the Eighteenth Century to the Present." 138 pp.
• Stephan Jaeger. "Performative Geschichtsschreibung: Forster, Herder, Schiller, Archenholz und die Brüdern Schlegel." Hermaea. Berlin / New York: de Gruyter, 2011. 395 pp. (xi + 384).
• Stephan Jaeger. Theorie lyrischen Ausdrucks: Das “unmarkierte Zwischen” in Gedichten von Brentano, Eichendorff, Trakl und Rilke. Munich: Fink, 2001. 384 pp.

• Evelyn Castillo Marzo, MA Thesis, “Mediating Difficult Knowledge through Storytelling: The Holocaust in German Museums in the Twenty-First Century.” 2024. Keywords: Holocaust exhibitions, storytelling, personal stories, difficult knowledge, museum studies, authenticity, empathy, distanciation and proximity, visitors agency.
• Annika Burkard, MA Thesis, “Die Flucht über das Meer im Rahmen der europäischen Flüchtlingskrise 2015/2016: Rezipientenlenkung und Aspekte des Politischen in Literatur und Film.” 2023. Keywords: refugees, Europe, sea, agency, precarity, solidarity, human rights, emotions, politics, colonialism, Styx, Havarie, Der Traum von Olympia.
• Emma Mikuska-Tinman, MA Thesis, “Mediating Memory through Materiality: Trauma Iconography of Flight and Expulsion in the 21st Century Museum.” 2018. Keywords: Germany, Poland, flight, expulsion, museum, memory, cultural memory, Second World War, 21st century, Museum of the Second World Gdansk, German-Russian Museum Berlin-Karlshorst, Center Against Expulsions, Federation of Expellees.
• Erin Johnston-Weiss, MA Thesis, “Empathy and Distanciation: an Examination of Holocaust Video- and Photography in the Topography of Terror, the German Military History Museum and the Canadian Museum for Human Rights.” 2016. Keywords: Holocaust, museum studies, photography, videography, distanciation, empathy, Second World War, German Studies.
• Heather Allen, MA Thesis, “Experiencing Literature – Learning from Experience: the Application of Neuroscience to Literary Analysis by Example of Representations of German Colonialism in Uwe Timm’s ‘Morenga.’” 2011. Keywords: Literature, German, neuroscience, genocide, Herero, Nama, Morenga, mirror neurons, Uwe Timm, default state networks, context nets, learning from history.

• 2023 - Faculty of Arts Award in Internationalization, University of Manitoba
• 2019-2020 - University of Manitoba nominee for SSHRC Connection Award (together with Adam Muller).
• 2019 - University of Manitoba Merit Award for outstanding achievements in Research.
• 2014-2020 - Insight Grant by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) for the project "Between national and transnational memories: World War II in the twenty-first-century museum in Europe and North America".
• 2006-2010 - Standard Research Grant by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) for the project “Narratological and Aesthetic Challenges for German Historiography 1800 and 2000”.
• 2001-2003 - Feodor-Lynen-Fellowship from the Alexander-von-Humboldt-Foundation (Bonn, Germany).

• Co-organization (together with Adam Muller) of University of Manitoba – University of Trier Biennial Partnership Conference “Resistance: Transnational Perspectives,” Winnipeg, University of Manitoba. 17–19 Sept. 2025.
• Co-organization (together with Natalie Eppelsheimer) of GSA-Seminar “Holocaust Tourism Revisited: Holocaust Memorial Culture between Education, Tourism, and Commemoration,” at the GSA (German Studies Association) Annual Conference 2021, online (Indianapolis), 30 Sept.-3 Oct. 2021.
• Co-organization (together with Belinda Kleinhans) of Annual Meetings of Canadian Association of University Teachers in German (CAUTG) at the Congress for the Social Sciences and Humanities in Vancouver (University of British Columbia) in 2019 and in Edmonton (University of Alberta, virtual) in 2021.
• Exhibition “Synagogues in Germany: A Virtual Reconstruction” & Research Symposium “Cultural Genocide in Comparative Perspective: Indigenous Studies and the Holocaust” (Feb. 3-5, 2017), together with Adam Muller (28 Jan.-4 Mar. 2017).
• Conference Chair for the International and Interdisciplinary Conference of the Languages and Cultures Circle of Manitoba & North Dakota (LCMND), “Languages and Cultures of Conflicts and Atrocities,” Winnipeg, University of Manitoba & Inn at the Forks, 11-13 Oct. 2012.