Jennifer Lynn

Ph.D. Student

jenlynn@unc.edu

Major Field: Modern European and Gender History

Advisor: Karen Hagemann

Bio: Jennifer Lynn is a doctoral Student at UNC Chapel Hill. She finished her B.A. in History in 2005 at  Montana State University. She completed her M.A. Thesis, "Imagining Women: Representation of the 'Modern Woman' in the German Illustrated Press, 1924-1933," in April 2008 at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. She currently extends this research on the subject for her dissertation entitled "Imagining Women: Gendered Representations of "Modern Women' in the German Illustrated Press, 1918-1960." Her research and teaching interests include modern German history, women's and gender history, cultural history and visual history.

Abstract of Reserach Project: Imagining Women: Gendered Representations of "Modern Women' in the German Illustrated Press, 1918-1960. Images of the Modern Woman emerged during the interwar years alongside the expansion of the illustrated press, a new form of mass media, which reached a broad social strata. Thus far, scholars have concentrated on this consumer orientated image without acknowledging the tensions and contestation between differing conceptions of femininity in the broad and changing political spectrum of postwar Germany and the nuanced differences found in the visual and textual representations produced in a wide range of illustrated magazines. Questioning the dominant depiction of the New Woman, I argue that illustrated magazines of different political backgrounds incorporated, modified and emphasized different elements of the Modern Woman and thus presented conflicting constructions of femininity while locating modernity within the female body.