Faculty of Modern & Medieval Languages
Raised Faculty Building
University of Cambridge
Sidgwick Avenue
Cambridge
CB3 9DA
United Kingdom
Leila Mukhida is Lecturer in Modern German Studies and Deputy Director of the DAAD Cambridge Research Hub for German Studies. Before taking up their post in Cambridge, Dr Mukhida held a Postdoctoral Fellowship at King’s College London, and taught German language and culture at KCL and film theory at Queen Mary University of London. They were awarded an MHRA Research Fellowship for the completion of their first monograph, Sensitive Subjects: The Political Aesthetics of Contemporary German and Austrian Cinema.
Topics on which Dr Mukhida teaches include: the film ‘Western’ by Valeska Grisebach for paper Ge1; Transnational Texts: Turkish-German Literature and Film for Ge6; Brechtian Theatre for Ge10; Islam in German Culture for Ge13; Documentary Film in the Twenty-first Century for Ge15; translation for paper GEB2; Queer Cinema for CS6; ‘Screening Gender’ for the MPhil in Film and Screen Studies; Ge Modern Culture for the ELAC Mphil.
Dr Mukhida specialises in German and Austrian visual culture, with a focus on cinema and the Frankfurt School, sound and industrial history, as well as queer and intersectional approaches to film and literature. In their research and their teaching, they advocate for diversity and decolonization in German Studies. Their book, Sensitive Subjects: The Political Aesthetics of Contemporary German and Austrian Cinema, looks to early German-language film theory in order to explore how post-1989 films by directors including Valeska Grisebach, Michael Haneke, Andreas Dresen and Elke Hauck engender a political sensitivity in viewers.
Dr Mukhida welcomes inquiries from potential MPhil and PhD students with research topics that correspond to their interests.
- Sensitive Subjects: The Political Aesthetics of Contemporary German & Austrian Cinema (New York: Berghahn Books, 2021)
- ‘The Talkie That Failed to Talk: An Exploration of Sounds in G. W. Pabst’s Kameradschaft (1931)’, Oxford German Studies, 49 (December 2020) 436-454
- 'Violence in the Age of Digital Reproducibility: Political Form in Valeska Grisebach’s Longing (2006)', German Politics & Society, 33 (May 2015), 172–185
- 'Against the Pull of Convention: Subversive Laughter in Angelina Maccarone’s Alles wird gut (1998)', German Life and Letters, 65 (Oct. 2012), 489-502
- Das Schönste Geschenk (2011). Film directed by Leila Mukhida and Subir Che Selia
