SLANE, Andrea 1964-

PERSONAL:

Born June 1, 1964, in New York, NY; immigrated to Canada; daughter of Charles (a mechanical engineer) and Elisabeth (a social worker; maiden name, Friedrich) Slane; companion of Eva Röser. Education: Rutgers University, B.A., 1986; University of California, San Diego, Ph.D., 1995; University of Toronto, J.D., 2003. Hobbies and other interests: Fiction writing, film/video/digital media making.

ADDRESSES:

Home—10 Sorauren Ave., No.3, Toronto, Ontario M6R 2C7, Canada. E-mail—andrea. [email protected].

CAREER:

University of California, San Diego, teaching assistant, 1989-94, lecturer, 1995; Old Dominion University, Norfolk, VA, assistant professor of English, 1995-2000; Osler, Hoskin & Harcourt, LLP, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, lawyer, 2003—. Documentary filmmaker; director of films The Other Woman, 1991; Scratching Surfaces, 1991; The Alleged, 1992; Irresistible Impulse, 1994; and Kinks in the System: Six Shorts about People Left to Their Own Devices, 1997. Cocreator of Web site Third Generation: Family Photographs and Memories of Nazi Germany, 2000.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Atlanta Film and Video Festival award, 1993, for The Alleged; summer research faculty fellowship, Old Dominion University, 1996; finalist for annual dissertation award, Society for Cinema Studies, 1996; Media Arts Program grant, Wexner Center for the Arts Center for Art and Technology, 1997; Carswell Prize in Torts, University of Toronto Faculty of Law, 2001.

WRITINGS:

A Not So Foreign Affair: Fascism, Sexuality, and the Cultural Rhetoric of American Democracy, Duke University Press (Durham, NC), 2001.

Contributor to anthologies, including War, Violence, and the Modern Condition, Walter de Gruyter, 1996, and Processed Lives: Gender and Technology in Everyday Life, Routledge, 1997. Contributor to periodicals, including American Book Review, Fiction International, Tessera, and Camera Obscura.

SIDELIGHTS:

Practicing attorney and former assistant professor of film studies at Virginia's Old Dominion University, Andrea Slane is the author of A Not So Foreign Affair: Fascism, Sexuality, and the Cultural Rhetoric of American Democracy. In this 2001 work she draws parallels between the fascist ideology promoted by Germany's National Socialist Party up to and during World War II and the gender discourse of the late twentieth century. Reviewing Slane's book in History: Review of New Books, Harvard Sitkoff dubbed the work "far-reaching" and "filled with perceptive observations about contemporary culture." Although the critic found the author's writing somewhat difficult, he added that she "brilliantly analyses a diverse array of both secondary and primary sources" in compiling her study.

Slane told CA: "I wrote about the topic of the image of German fascism because as a child growing up with a German mother in the United States, I was plagued from a young age by the equation of Germans and Nazis. In grade school, I often suppressed my heritage, preferring to foreground my father's Irishness. By high school I had come to embrace a politics that rejected everything fascist—very broadly construed—and to take a martyred pleasure in the fact that my own grandfather had been a Nazi and would probably argue loudly with me, had he outlived the war. But by graduate school I was ready to look at fascism in America with a more analytical eye. By understanding American political and popular culture on this topic, I have come to better understand myself."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

American Historical Review, April, 2002, Michael E. Birdwell, review of A Not So Foreign Affair: Fascism, Sexuality, and the Cultural Rhetoric of American Democracy, p. 574.

Choice, December, 2001, R. D. Sears, review of A Not So Foreign Affair: Fascism, Sexuality, and the Cultural Rhetoric of American Democracy, p. 692.

History: Review of New Books, winter, 2002, Harvard Sitkoff, review of A Not So Foreign Affair: Fascism, Sexuality, and the Cultural Rhetoric of American Democracy, p. 47.

Journal of American History, June, 2002, Laura A. Belmonte, review of A Not So Foreign Affair: Fascism, Sexuality, and the Cultural Rhetoric of American Democracy, p. 283.*