Fatima Naqvi is currently chair of the FMS program. Her research is situated at the intersection of literature, film, and architecture. The environment as it relates to human experience stands in the foreground. She is deeply committed to curmudgeons, nay-sayers, and querulous types: Thomas Bernhard, Elfriede Jelinek, Peter Handke, Ulrich Seidl, Michael Haneke, Nikolaus Geyrhalter, and Ruth Beckermann are privileged subjects of research.

Recent work has looked at the interplay between landscape and what is known as “coming to terms” with the traumatic past in the Federal Republic of Germany after World War II. In The Insulted Landscape (2021), she groups strange bedfellows—Alexander Kluge, Wim Wenders, Peter Handke, Alexander Mitscherlich and Albert Speer—to show how discourses on the landscape become prominent simultaneously with the rehabilitation of Hitler’s premier architect and renewed interest in the Nazis’ conceptualization of landscape.

At the moment, she is working on a book on the “architectures of illness”: hospitals, clinics, and sanatoria in Vienna. Focusing on the period of 1880-2020, she examines the construction of clinics in the waning years of empire. In this period, hospitals mold the modern experience of the emergent middle class. In the tentatively titled Sick House: The Clinical Complex in Vienna, hospital construction becomes the ‘glue’ holding together a waning Austria-Hungary. The attendant experiences—waiting, subordination, examination, monetization—become central to people’s perceptions of health care in the modern era. Utilizing films from the last decades, she also homes in on ageing in the era of the clinical megastructure. A central argument of her book is that the structures framing the beginnings and the ends of our lives have not come in for the close scrutiny they deserve.

She invites students from all parts of the university to help her think about such contemporary problems in courses such as “Landscape, Film, and Architecture” and “Post War German Film.” She strives for an inclusive classroom experience, where varied viewpoints can be expressed.

She has written books on the perception of victimhood in Western European culture between 1968 and the new millennium (The Literary and Cultural Rhetoric of Victimhood, 2007). A persistent focus has been the scintillating films of Michael Haneke (Trügerische Vertrautheit, 2010, Michael Haneke: Interviews, 2020; The White Ribbon, 2020); and the intersection of the architectural avantgarde and the discourse of Bildung in the novels by Thomas Bernhard (How We Learn Where We Live, 2016). She has held visiting professorships at the Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz and Harvard University and for many years taught at Rutgers University. In what feels like another lifetime, she attended Dartmouth (BA) and Harvard (MA, PhD).