Curriculum Vitae


Ultrashort

Hildegard Elisabeth Keller lives at Bloomington, IN, and Zürich and works as a free author and a professor for literature at an American and a Swiss university.

Short

Born in St. Gall (Switzerland) and raised in the eastern part of Switzerland (Wil and the Toggenburg). In the early seventies she and three of her four siblings gave back her German "Kinderpass" (passport for children). Ever since she travels with the red passport with the white cross.

She studied German and Spanish Literature and Linguistics as well as Sociology at Basel and Zürich. Ph.D. 1992, Habilitation 2000. Assistant Professor at the University of Zürich 2001-2007. Since 2008 she has been Full Professor for German Literature in the Germanic Department at Indiana University, Bloomington ⁄ USA; since 2007 she has also taught as Titularprofessorin [Honorary Professor] at the University of Zürich.

In the last years, her full atttention was given to the quintuplets about the town-physician and playwright Jakob Ruf from Zürich who lived in the sixteenth century in Zürich (Jakob Ruf. Leben, Werk und Studien, 5 volumes and 2 cds, by far her heaviest publication: 20 lbs) and to the triplets about eight personalities from the history of Christian and non-Christian mysticism who meet each other in a realm outside of time and space (Trilogie des Zeitlosen, 3 volumes, 6 cds, 2011).

Multimedia approaches to and animation of literature are crucial to her. Since 2009 she has been a jury member at the Days for German Literature at Klagenfurt (Austria), since 2012 a member in the team of critics of the Literaturclub of the Swiss TV SF. Since 1993 she has been producing theatrical readings along with actors, musicians as well as undergraduates and graduate students. Since 2005 she has produced and co-produced several audio media (audio books, audio guides, listening stations), in 2010 a radio-feature about Alfonsina Storni (1892-1938) and in 2012 a film (Der Ozean im Fingerhut / The Ocean in a Thimble). Currently she is preparing a German translation of Storni's prose and writing a biography about her.

Portrait in the St.Galler Tagblatt (Brigitte Schmid-Gugler), 05/03/2012

To listen

Musik für einen Gast, Summer 2011

To watch

CV

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