Brandy E. Wilcox (she/her) is a Visiting Assistant Professor of German in the Modern Languages Department at Knox College.

I received my master’s degree in German Literature from UW-Madison in 2016 with a concentration on world literature and fairytales and defended my dissertation in 2023. Prior to beginning graduate school, I used my double major from Truman State University (2010) as the French and German teacher at a private school in northern Illinois. My research and teaching interests center on fairy tales, the transmission and adaptation of tales into new contexts, folklore, Middle High German epic literature, gender and sexuality, migration, and world literature.

My article “Brothers Grimm: From the Oral to the Literary and Beyond,” exploring the influence of the Grimms’ fairytales within the context of world literature, appeared in the Wiley Blackwell Companion to World Literature in December 2019. My 2021 article, “Pregnancy, Purity, and Body Autonomy in ‘New Originals’ of ‘Rapunzel’,” appeared in German Quarterly’s special issue on fairytales in a global context and discusses the shift to the importance of truth and loyalty over sexual purity in fairy-tale film. This article was developed from a portion of the first chapter of my dissertation project, “Of Wald and Walt: Power and Gender in East German and US-American Fairy-Tale Film Adaptations”. This project compares the portrayal of princess figures in the fairy-tale film traditions of the former German Democratic Republic and the United States, identifying them against their traditional tales and in comparison to trends in feminist theory and sociopolitical movements.

In my free time you can often find me playing trumpet and performing on stage (usually with the Forward! Marching Band in Madison). During and beyond global pandemics, I like to read cozy Krimis and fantasy in German and English, give scritches to dogs, and recreate dishes from my mom’s handwritten recipe book.