Rate My Professor Seth Howes

Seth Howes serves as Millsap Distinguished Professor and Associate Professor of German in the School of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at the University of Missouri-Columbia, where he joined the faculty in 2014 and was promoted to associate professor. He also holds the position of associate chair of the school. Howes earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Texas at Austin in 2006 and a Doctor of Philosophy from the University of Michigan in 2012. His distinguished teaching and mentorship have earned him several prestigious awards, including the William T. Kemper Fellowship for Teaching Excellence in 2024, the Provost’s Outstanding Junior Faculty Teaching Award in 2018, and the University of Missouri Graduate School’s Outstanding Director of Graduate Studies Award. Additionally, he received the Millsap Distinguished Professorship in 2025 for outstanding accomplishments and contributions to his field. Howes has significantly impacted undergraduate and graduate education through his dynamic classroom presence, leadership of study abroad programs in Germany, direction of theses and grant writing workshops as a faculty fellow in the MU Fellowships Office, and roles as faculty co-director of the MU Humanities Symposium for Undergraduate Research and advisor to the German Club. Colleagues and students praise his use of the Socratic method to empower students, foster self-confidence, and promote inclusive intellectual environments.

Howes specializes in twentieth-century German literature and culture, with a focus on Cold War-era phenomena such as punk rock and experimental filmmaking in East Germany, the prose and political thought of Peter Weiss, sound, music, and noise in German cinema since 1961, and the postwar fate of the Conservative Revolution in Eastern Germany. His monograph, Moving Images on the Margins: Experimental Film in Late Socialist East Germany (Boydell & Brewer, 2020), examines experimental cinema in the GDR. He co-edited Beyond No Future: Cultures of German Punk (Bloomsbury Academic, 2016) and a special issue of New German Critique on Peter Weiss’s Aesthetics of Resistance (2022). Key publications include “Fassbinder’s Jews: Screening Jewish/German History in Berlin Alexanderplatz (1980)” (New German Critique, 2025), “‘Ein neuer Goya’: Jonathan Littell and Ernst Jünger in the Caucasus” (Modernism/Modernity, 2025), and “We Can Come Very Close to Them: Solidarity and the Struggle for Liberation in The Aesthetics of Resistance” (New German Critique, 2022). His scholarship bridges subcultural studies, film history, and political aesthetics, contributing to understandings of East German dissident art forms.