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Sunka Simon

Professor of German, Film and Media Studies

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Department Overview

Sunka Simon received her M.A. in German and American literature from the Universität Hamburg and her Ph.D. in German and Literary Theory from The Johns Hopkins University. She is the author of German Crime Dramas from Network TV to Netflix (Bloomsbury Press, 2023), Mail-Orders: The Fiction of Letters in Postmodern Culture (Suny Press, 2002), co-author of Globally Networked Teaching in the Humanities:Theories and Practices (Routledge Press, 2015) as well as scholarly articles on German literature, film, and popular culture. Simon holds a joint appointment in German and Film and Media Studies at Swarthmore College, where she teaches courses on German, European, and U.S. popular culture with a focus on Television Studies.

New Book

German Crime Dramas from Network Television to Netflix approaches German television crime dramas to uncover the intersections between the genre's media-specific network and post-network formats and how these negotiate with and contribute to concepts of the regional, national, and global. 

Part I concentrates on the ARD network's long-running flagship series Tatort (Crime Scene 1970-). Because the domestically produced crime drama succeeded in interacting with and competing against dominant U.S. formats during 3 different mediascapes, it offers strategic lessons for post-network television. Situating 9 Tatort episodes in their televisual moment within the Sunday evening flow over 38 years and 3 different German regions reveals how producers, writers, directors, critics, and audiences interacted not only with the cultural socio-political context, but also responded to the challenges aesthetically, narratively, and media-reflexively. 

Part II explores how post-2017 German crime dramas (Babylon Berlin, Dark, Perfume, and Dogs of Berlin) rework the genre's formal and narrative conventions for global circulation on Netflix. Each chapter concentrates on the dynamic interplay between time-shifted viewing, transmedia storytelling, genre hybridity, and how these interact with projections of cultural specificity and continue or depart from established network practices. The results offer crucial information and inspiration for producers and executives, for creative teams, program directors, and television scholars.

 

Book Link

Globally Networked Teaching in the Humanities: Theories and Practices (Routledge, 2015)

As colleges and universities in North America increasingly identify "internationalization" as a key component of the institution’s mission and strategic plans, faculty and administrators are charged with finding innovative and cost-effective approaches to meet those goals. This volume provides an overview and concrete examples of globally-networked learning environments across the humanities from the perspective of all of their stakeholders: teachers, instructional designers, administrators and students. By addressing logistical, technical, pedagogical and intercultural aspects of globally-networked teaching, this volume offers a unique perspective on this form of curricular innovation through internationalization. It speaks directly to the ways in which new technologies and pedagogies can promote humanities-based learning for the future and with it the broader essential skills of intercultural sensitivity, communication and collaboration, and critical thinking.

Publisher
image of book cover - standard Routledge blue/white

Mail-Orders: The Fiction of Letters in Postmodern Culture (SUNY Press, 2002)

Review excerpt - Richard Macksey, MLN 117.5 (2002): 1154-1155.

Sunka Simon "is a scholarly historian of epistolary narrative, but Mail-Orders escapes disciplinary boundaries and received genres to examine how profoundly recent changes in the technology of communication have transformed the social and cultural practices of letter-writing. She addresses her topic with a ready wit, an ample store of apt illustrations (from the 18th to the 21st centuries), and a sharp eye for recognizing relevant connections between the often hermetic discourses of cultural studies, literary studies, and film/media studies.  While the advent and structure of electronic mail has been discussed in web caucuses, newspapers, and conferences on hypertext and communication theory, its significance has not previously been considered fully in conjunction with epistolary scenarios in film, art, and literature. Addressing this gap, Mail-Orders explores the contemporary status of the epistolary form and its connections to feminist criticism, literary experiment, and various flavors of postmodernism."

Publisher
book cover of vagina as mailbox

1970s Popular Music Shows on German Television

"Licht aus - Spot an: How Schlager (ZDF 1969-1984) beat Disco (ZDF 1971-1982)." German Politics and Society, Issue 123, 35.2 (Summer 2017): 48-59.

During the broadcast era, dominant culture reigned supreme on West German television. Das Zweite Deutsche Fernsehen (ZDF) achieved ratings of close to 74 percent during the long Saturday slot in the 1970s. This mass reach, especially of its live popular music programs with built-in audience votes, is often disregarded in historical arguments that focus on the political disunion of that decade. This article takes a closer look at two very different, yet exceptionally popular music shows, Deutsche Hitparade (1969–1984) and Disco (1971–1982), to investigate how the anxiety over sociopolitical change is negotiated on live television, how medium specificity intersects with constructions of masculinity and authority, and how different music and television formats question, manage and produce a national imaginary.

Journal Website
Suited man sitting on a chair in a TV studio

A Cinematography of Displacement

“Heimat: Diaspora - Ulrich Seidl’s Paradies: Liebe (Paradise: Love, 2012).” Anxious Journeys: Contemporary German Travel Literature. Eds. Karin Baumgartner and Monika Shafi. Rochester: Boydell & Brewer, 2019. 247-263.

Seidl’s films are intent on complicating the notion of travel, traveling and traveler.  Paradies: Liebe disturbs, even upends, the traditional dichotomy between tourist destination and homeland.  Simon argues that the film’s cinematography consistently employs a discursive strategy of displacement.

Book cover and film still

Recent Reappropriations of Weimar and Nazi-Era Popular Music

“Irresistible Innocence:  Reappropriations of Weimar and Nazi-Era Schlager,”” Reworking the German Past:  Adaptations in Film, the Arts, and Popular Culture. Eds. Susan Figge and Jenifer Ward.  Columbia, SC: Camden House, 2010. 130-153.

The recent turn toward domestic cultural products frequently takes the form of reappropriation of popular music from the German past.  In this article, Simon investigates how Manfred Krug’s and Ulrich Tukur’s German Schlager allow us to view the postmodern and postcolonial reproduction of pre-1945 German pop tunes as a politicized aesthetic practice, voiced as a resistance against the U.S. Über-Culture, even as subversion of dominant modes of culture production.  Simon discusses how these mostly unreflective reappropriations strengthen existing nationalistic and chauvinistic tendencies within German culture at large.

Publisher
Ullrich Tukur's CD cover with the CD shaped like a record

PERCEPTICON - Propaganda Room: How do Propaganda and Surveillance interact with Nationalism and Patriotism and our daily Lives?

PERCEPTICON: A Mellon Funded Interactive Installation Project to challenge Unconscious Bias in Reception Habits

Propaganda Room

PERCEPTICON - Lost in Translation Room: How do we read across cultural specificities, when translated, untranslated and untranslatable texts, sounds and images meet?

Museum meets Escape Room: Three Rooms - 20 Minute Group Challenges with Friends or Strangers

Lost in Translation Room

PERCEPTICON - Blair Witch Room: How do we convert a room full of miscellaneous objects into a narrative, and how do gender, class and race figure into free-form storytelling?

Design Team: Sunka Simon, Amy Kim and Kevin Medansky (Film and Media Studies), Laila Swanson, Mikhail Ahmed and Nadia Malaya (Theater)

Blair Witch Room

Transmedia Adaptations Projects

Taking our cue from adaptation theories (Linda Hutcheon et alii) and key case studies, students in the capstone course investigated what happens, when a text migrates from one medium to another, how medium specificity changes exhibition, reception and critical interaction practices.  For their final projects, each student pitched a transmedia adaptation project ranging from novel to television script or podcast, from comic to videogame, from radio to museum installation.

Student Final Projects
Life of Pi island

Television Class Projects

Reality Television 2016

The class of 9 students produced an episode of "Queer Eye for the Queer Guy" modeled on the 2003 Bravo (now Netflix) show. The project premiered with a red carpet interview session, live-streamed and cast-tweeted for a dual screen experience.

Television and New Media 2015

The class of 20 students wrote, cast, directed, shot, edited, organized and held a red carpet screening of the pilot episode of "The Real World: Swarthmore," modeled after the MTV original RTV series. To mimic televisual flow, students developed four commercials and integrated them into the pilot's segmented narrative structure.

 

TV Class Project Screenings (2018, 2016, 2015)

First Globally Networked Class at Swarthmore (2012)

This class, co-developed and executed with a Suny COIL grant by Profs. Sunka Simon (German/FMST), Carina Yervasi (French/FMST) and Mikelle Antoine (African History at Ashesi), was taught synchronously via Skype between Swarthmore College in PA (USA) and Ashesi University in Akkra (Ghana) for two hours each week. The two classes met asynchronously for another two hours and collaborated in shared group assignments via email and discussion forums on Moodle. 

Based on the class, Simon and Yervasi co-authored “Re-Envisioning Diasporas in the Globally Connected Classroom.” Globally Networked Teaching in the Humanities: Theories and Practices.  Eds. Alexandra Schultheis-Moore and Sunka Simon. London/NY:  Routledge Press, 2015. 136-155.

Article
Ashesi classroom

Discussion between Ashesi students (pictured) and Swarthmore students (on screen)

Profs. Simon and Yervasi with students at Swarthmore (USA)

Prof. Antoine with students at Ashesi (Ghana)