Andrea Opitz Visiting Assistant Professor of English Ph.D. University of Washington M.A. University of Montana B.A. Free University Berlin Office: 308G Independence Hall Phone: 401-874-4666 E-Mail: aopitz@mail.uri.edu Office Hours: Tues 2:00 - 3:00, Thur 11:00 - 12:00 or by appt.

Andrea Opitz took an early interest in film and theatre arts at the University of California at Santa Cruz, a focus she continued while participating in the American Studies program at the John-F.-Kennedy Institute in Berlin, Germany.  She later returned to the U.S. and shifted to a more literary focus in her work at the Universities of Montana and Washington, where she completed graduate study in American literature. Her particular research and teaching interest in Native American literature has resulted in a translation of James Welch’s 1986 novel Fools Crow, and a critical essay reflecting on this writing exercise. She also attempted, albeit unsuccessfully, to find a German publisher interested in the translation. Working from a transatlantic perspective, Opitz has also published on Welch’s The Heartsong of Charging Elk, examining questions of race, national belonging, and resistance.

Currently, following one of the strands of her dissertation, Opitz works on haunting and the politics of loss in contemporary fiction and film. An essay she is working on right now examines politics of public memory in contemporary Berlin by looking at cinematic and spatial (architectural, urban planning) responses to German reunification narratives and larger questions of post-war German history. In another project, more closely related to her research focus on American literature, Opitz pursues her interest in Jamaican-born writer Michelle Cliff’s reading of American history as a history of forgetting. In this essay, Opitz brings Cliff in conversation with Avery Gordon, whose theories on haunting and "ghostly matters" have made their way into hidden nooks of Opitz’s scholarship and teaching. 

Opitz comes to URI in Fall 07 from the University of Washington where she has taught literature and writing courses, as well as courses in comparative literature, film studies, American Indian literature, and American Ethnic studies.  Some of these courses have focused on the politics of travel; on gender, race and questions of representation; and on space and place in literature.