Susanne Zantop

On January 27, 2001, Susanne Zantop and her husband, Half, were found murdered in their home. For information about this tragedy, see the archives of "The Dartmouth" (enter "Zantop" in the search field).

At the time of her death, Susanne Zantop was Professor of German and Comparative Literature and The Parents' Distinguished Research Professor in the Humanities. She had been chairing German Studies since 1996. Before coming to Dartmouth, she studied Political Science in Berlin and at Stanford and Comparative Literature at the University of Massachusetts and Harvard (Ph.D. 1984). She also taught at Santiago de Compostela (Spain). Specializing in 18th and 19th century fiction and the history of ideas, she wrote articles on Goethe, Heine, Frederike Unger, and topics concerning German colonialist fictions and the French Revolution. In 1988 she published Zeitbilder: Geschichte und Literatur bei Heinrich Heine und Mariano Jose de Larra. Her study of Colonial Fantasies: Conquest, Family, and Nation in Precolonial Germany, 1770-1870 (1997) was published in German in 1999 by Erich Schmidt as Kolonialphantasien im vorkolonialen Deutschland (1770-1870).

Prof. Zantop also edited a number of books: Paintings on the Move: Heinrich Heine and the Visual Arts (1989), Friederike Unger's Bekenntnisse einer schönen Seele (1991), and Julchen Grünthal (1991). She was co-editor of Bitter Healing: German Women Writers from 1700 to 1830: An Anthology (1990) and The Imperialist Imagination: German Colonialism and its Legacy (1999), and at the time of her death she had also completed an anthology, Germans and Indians, with Dartmouth colleagues Colin Calloway and Gerd Gemünden.

In addition, she was co-editor of the Women in German Yearbook, an advisory editor of Eighteenth Century Studies, and a member of the editorial board of the German Studies Review.