Emily Allegra Dreyfus

Emily Allegra Dreyfus is a cultural historian of Cinema and Media and a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Film University Babelsberg. Her 2020 PhD (University of Chicago) considered the political and aesthetic dimensions of music in Nazi-era cinema. Integrating analytical approaches from Film, Literary Studies and Musicology, her work addresses the aesthetics of feeling in visual culture, the unfolding of music and images in time, and the cultural and historical contingencies of emotional self-understanding. Beyond academia, Emily is an active freelance musician.

Emily Dreyfus will be preparing a book manuscript entitled Dissonance in the Dark: Music in Nazi Cinema. The monograph explores the complex interplay of sound, image, and ideology in the largely forgotten field of German mass culture from 1933-1945. It argues that the obsessive return to musical subjects and the question of sensitivity in mainstream cinema under Hitler defies binaries of propaganda vs. escapist entertainment, instead revealing deep internal conflicts in everyday Fascist society around gender, sexuality, class, and race.