Elizabeth Goodstein is faced with an unusual problem: what to tell people when they ask about her line of work. Sometimes she calls herself a rhetorician, which makes good sense, since Goodstein received her Ph.D. in Rhetoric from the University of California, Berkeley. But because her work draws widely from history, philosophy, literature, sociology, psychoanalysis, and politics, she may also introduce herself as a cultural theorist. Like her interests, Goodstein’s work varies widely. She writes about people, places, memory, modernity. And although she may have trouble placing herself within a single academic discipline, one thing there’s no confusion over is her success.

An associate professor in the Graduate Institute of the Liberal Arts (ILA), Goodstein received the both the Modern Language Association’s Prize for a First Book and the German Studies Association/DAAD Book Prize for Experience Without Qualities: Boredom and Modernity. This book explores the cultural history of boredom and relates it to specifically modern ways of experiencing time and thinking about human existence. As Goodstein shows, boredom is not (as it might seem) a timeless state of being—the word did not even come into existence until the 18th century. Drawing on literature, philosophy, and sociology, Experience without Qualities connects the cultural history of boredom to fundamental questions about temporality and about the meaning of subjective experience in modernity.

In 2002 Goodstein was awarded an Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellowship, which allowed her to spend a year in Berlin through an affiliation with the University of Leipzig. In the Fall of 2007 she was a Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin. Goodstein, who publishes in both English and German, used her time abroad to develop two important projects, both of which are ongoing. The first, Georg Simmel and the Phenomenology of Culture, delves into the work of the once-famous German philosopher and sociologist from the turn of the twentieth century; but it also intervenes in contemporary cultural theory. According to Goodstein, the story of Simmel’s complicated reception in twentieth-century thought is important in several ways: "thinking about that story and exploring the paradox that Simmel is at once marginal to and canonical for social theory reveals a lot about the intellectual organization of thought and inquiry in the past hundred years." How do we understand theory? What makes ideas modern? How do we classify theoretical work, or theorists themselves, in relation to disciplines? Simmel’s work, she argues, may help us to think in new ways about such questions, yet even today most of his texts–including almost all of his philosophical works—have never been translated into English.

Goodstein’s other book project, History in Repose: Unifying Memory in Contemporary Germany, explores conflicting memories and narratives associated with concentration camp memorials and other "memory sites" located in what was once East Germany. After the war, the former concentration camp sites were used to imprison Nazi war criminals and other political prisoners; then to house various military installations of the Russian occupiers; and finally as gathering places for state-sponsored memory rituals organized by the "anti-fascist" GDR government. The many different, conflicting meanings embedded in these memory sites, says Goodstein, "gave rise to the idea of history in repose: how can we think about these places that were not only concentration camps but have multiple layers of meaning and experience built up over that use? The problem faced by the contemporary memorial sites is how to represent the connections and disconnections between all these different stories, all these different levels, all these different times." Living in Germany, Goodstein was able to spend time visiting the memorials, gaining a deeper understanding of the complex history ingrained in them.

These memory sites are particularly important for contemporary Germany because they reflect a divided collective memory. Says Goodstein, East and West Germany "had very different stories about the Nazi past, about its relation to the German nation." In her research, Goodstein explores how the memorials represent—or fail to represent—the history that lies in repose in these sites. In doing so, she is trying to answer a complicated question. As she expresses it, "What will be the future memory of the Nazi past in a unified Germany, as the country copes with the complex circumstances of cultural, sociological, and historical, transformation? What type of collective memory will Germans form, post-Cold War, of the National Socialist pasts—and how will this process be reflected in the memory sites?"

As Goodstein completes her book, she has her eye on yet another project: the creation of a cultural theory graduate course that takes into account the major paradigm shifts that have occurred over the last two decades. In teaching, as in her research, Goodstein strives to keep scholarship in the humanities vibrant in a changing world: "I think the question is how to move forward while remembering where we have been and how to think about doing new and innovative scholarship that connects with the enormous challenges of the twenty-first century." In addition to her other work, Goodstein will continue teaching several favorite courses: a freshman seminar on art, music, and literature in Vienna; an undergraduate class on Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud; and a graduate seminar on theorists from Simmel to Adorno. She is passionate about the importance of grounding undergraduate education in the liberal arts and about giving students the skills they need to become self-motivated learners.

Goodstein’s interdisciplinary teaching and research have made the ILA a perfect academic home for her. Given her background in rhetoric and cultural theory and her wide-ranging interests, she’s pleased to be part of an institute that allows her to explore their full interdisciplinary range. "As someone who came out of an interdisciplinary graduate program, I feel extremely fortunate to be able to teach in one," comments Goodstein, "because there aren¹t very many places like the ILA."