Barbara Vinken

Barbara Vinken is a literary and cultural scholar and a theorist of fashion. She earned doctorates in Konstanz and at Yale University and completed her habilitation in Jena. After holding chairs in Romance studies in Hamburg and Zurich, she became a professor of General Literary Studies and Romance Philology at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich in 2004. Her publications include Die deutsche Mutter (2001), Bestien: Kleist und die Deutschen (2011), Angezogen: Das Geheimnis der Mode (2013), Flaubert: Durchkreuzte Moderne (2009), and Bel Ami (2020). Angezogen was nominated for the Leipzig Book Fair Prize. She received the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany and Bavaria’s Pro meritis scientiae et litterarum order. By her own account, she had been studying Flaubert since the age of fifteen.