Holly Yanacek is associate professor of German at JMU. Her research focuses on 19th- to 21st-century Germanophone literature and culture, emotion studies, narrative theory, gender studies, and posthumanism. Yanacek co-edited the interdisciplinary volume  (DeGruyter, 2021), which examines the affective relationships between humans and non-human animals, robots, and machines in modern German cultural history. She is a member of the Keywords Project () and, together with Colin MacCabe, co-edited the collaborative book  published by Oxford University Press in 2018. 
Yanacek is currently finishing the manuscript for a monograph on the renegotiation of social and moral emotions in fin-de-siècle German literature. She is also working on an English translation of Ich bin dein Mensch (2019), a novella by award-winning contemporary German author , whose work served as the inspiration for Maria Schrader’s 2021 prize-winning film .
Yanacek earned her doctorate and master's in German studies at the University of Pittsburgh and her bachelor's in German at Heidelberg University. She also studied in Germany as a DAAD Undergraduate Scholar at Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg and as a Fulbright Graduate Research Fellow at the Freie Universität Berlin.