Greetings!
My name is Martin Schwartz, and I’m delighted to return to my academic journey—after a generous break—as a Kade Fellow at the University of Washington Department of German Studies. I completed my MA at University of Chicago in 2006, writing about contemporary German drama, after earning my BA in Literatures of the World (German), at UC San Diego, and an indelible year at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin through the University of California’s honors study program. Since those times, I’ve had a fairly wide-ranging career in culture and the arts, with positions including head of the cultural section at the Consulate General of Switzerland in San Francisco (for nearly ten years) and, until its untimely closure last year, Program Curator at Goethe Pop Up Seattle, where I was responsible for contemporary art exhibitions and initiatives in film, literature, music, and beyond. Alongside my more “official” career I maintained a profile as a professional playwright (albeit very much in the indie scene), with some five of my plays produced (and one published). I've caught the film programming bug as well, and after curating and organizing the Pop Up’s GERMAN CINEMA NOW! series at Northwest Film Forum, I was engaged in 2022 to program German, Austrian, and Swiss cinema for Seattle International Film Festival.
My academic interests center on questions of antisemitism in culture, with a focus on antisemitic content in postwar German-language cinema and theatre. Bias against Jews and Judaism has been a constitutive element of Western culture for millennia, and through investigating its tropes and movements in more recent cultural expression, I hope to contribute to broader awareness of this arsenal of hate. I’m thrilled to do so at UW German, with the benefit of the department’s extraordinary range of expertise, and at the broader UW, with its deep resources in Cinema and Media Studies, Theatre and Performance Studies, and Jewish Studies. And, last but not least, as an adoptive Seattleite and the father of a six-year-old, I’m thrilled not to have to relocate!