Gail E. Finney

Gail E. Finney is an American literary scholar and professor emerita of Comparative Literature and German at the University of California, Davis.

She is known for her research in literary scholarship, especially in psychoanalysis, trauma theory, nineteenth- and twentieth-century European literature, and gender studies.

Education and career She earned her A.B. degree in German summa cum laude from Princeton University and completed her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. From 1980 to 1988, she taught at Harvard University as assistant and then associate professor of German, later returning in 1997 as a visiting professor.

In 1988 she joined UC Davis, where she served as professor of German and comparative literature until her retirement in 2020. Her administrative roles at UC Davis included assistant vice provost for academic personnel from 1997 to 2000 and Faculty Assistant for Academic Personnel to the Dean of Humanities, Arts, and Cultural Studies from 2007 to 2008.

After retiring in December 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic; Finney remained active in scholarly, creative, and community pursuits.

She also resumed musical training through piano lessons and became involved in community theater, performing in six productions with the Winters Theatre Company. Finney has participated regularly in the Gerlind Institute for Cultural Studies in Oakland, where she later joined the board. turn-of-the-century European drama, modern drama, the nineteenth-century European novel, feminism, and postwar German women writers.

Her scholarship has been supported fellowships from the DAAD, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. Women in Modern Drama: Freud, Feminism, and European Theater at the Turn of the Century; and the edited volume Look Who’s Laughing: Gender and Comedy.

She has also authored a monograph on Christa Wolf and contributed to interdisciplinary cultural studies with Visual Culture in Twentieth-Century Germany: Text as Spectacle.

Selected publications

Selected books

Selected articles