Elizabeth Otto is an art historian and the author of Tempo, Tempo! The Bauhaus Photomontages of Marianne Brandt, the coauthor of Bauhaus Women: A Global Perspective, and the coeditor of five books including Bauhaus Bodies: Gender, Sexuality, and Body Culture in Modernism's Legendary Art School. She is Associate Professor at the University at Buffalo (SUNY), where she has also served as the Executive Director of the Humanities Institute. Her work has been supported by numerous organizations including the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, the National Humanities Center, and the University at Pittsburgh's Humanities Center.
In Haunted Bauhaus, we come to understand Bauhaus design as more than the machine aesthetic of its celebrated products... Otto's beautifully designed, lucidly written, and well-illustrated book restores the messiness of people, bodies, lives, and passions to the Bauhaus narrative, casting its serene geometries in a new light. -Barbara McCloskey, Journal of Design History Certainly it is not incorrect to discuss the Bauhaus as a model of rational modernism. Real-estate agents and antique dealers have long adopted the name of the school thus, as a pleasant catchphrase. But Otto pointedly reveals that which almost inevitably must be omitted from such a perspective: the approach of the Weimar- and then Dessau-based design school was more occult, spiritual, queer, and politically radical than can be expressed by the general formula, Bauhaus style. -Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung Example after example, [Elizabeth] Otto expands our view of a legendary institution, finally freeing it from the limiting confines of a tired old narrative. It's about time, she convinces us, to widen and refocus the scope of scholarly inquiry into the Bauhaus in order to truly understand its contemporary significance. -The Brooklyn Rail Otto shows us that the dominant Bauhaus narrative erased valuable stories. One realizes that there cannot be one complete account of the non-compliant lives that passed through its doors. Yet, by tying these hidden and diverse stories together, the book provides a necessary starting point for future investigations into our marginalized pasts. -Paprika! The Yale Architecture Newspaper Haunted Bauhaus is as eye-opening as it is door-opening... Haunted by utopian aspirations and its own history, the Bauhaus helped remake (and unmake) the world in ways its founders could never have anticipated. -J. Hoberman, Artforum