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."

"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.

“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.

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.