2019 Cohort
Olivia Albiero is Assistant Professor of Italian and German in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures at San Francisco State University. Her primary research focuses on contemporary German-language literature, which she explores through the lens of narratology, as well as on the representation of moments of rupture in literature, comics and graphic novels, which often ensue from crucial experiences of physical and metaphorical mobility or lack thereof.
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Katherine Anderson is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor at College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, MA. Her research interests include literature written by authors not native to the German language and the contexts that facilitate the writing and publishing of this literature. Her dissertation examined the debut novels of Abbas Khider and María Cecilia Barbetta for an understanding of how the German language facilitates the writing process for authors writing about personally and societally experienced traumas.
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Gary L. Baker is Professor of German at Denison University. Baker received his Masters Degree from Penn State and did his PhD at the University of Minnesota. At Denison he teaches in both the German and International Studies programs. His scholarly work focuses on post-war German literature and culture including work on Uwe Johnson, Uwe Timm, and Jenny Erpenbeck. More recently he is exploring research themes such as violence, mobility, and borders.
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Judith Benz is an associate professor of German and head of the German program at Juniata College in Huntingdon, Pennsylvania. Her research focuses on adaptations of the Arthurian legend in German-speaking literature of the 20th and 21st century, respectively. She is currently vice president of the AATG Central Pennsylvania chapter.
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Lauren Brooks received her PhD in German Literature and Culture at Penn State University in 2018. Her research interests include the works of Franz Kafka and their relation to Yiddish theater, Jewish humor and how these traditions influenced American comedy and American popular culture. Her research also includes project based assessment in the German as a foreign language classroom. She will begin a new position in the fall as a Visiting Assistant Professor of German at High Point University.
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Thomas Fuhr is a Graduate Associate in his second year of the University of Arizona’s joint doctoral program Transcultural German Studies. Currently preparing for his dissertation at the Universität Leipzig, he is researching motifs and (de)constructions of “Heimat” and family in contemporary literature as well as the recurring exotification and projections of Native Americans in German literature and culture. His general German studies interests include memory, migrant literature and pop culture.
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David Gramling is Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of German Studies at The University of Arizona in Tucson. His research involves literary translation, multilingualism, migration literature, queer / trans* studies, Turkish literature, and Conversation Analysis in health care settings. Future books include The Invention of Multilingualism (Cambridge University Press) and Literature in the Linguacene (under review with Stanford University Press). He is currently completing a translation of Murathan Mungan’s Turkish novel War Stories (Cenk Hikayeleri).
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Rachel J. Halverson is Professor of German and Chair of the Department of Modern Languages and Cultures at the University of Idaho. She specializes in post-war and post-unification German literature and culture and has published on the Historikerstreit, and the works of Siegfried Lenz, Jurek Becker, Thomas Brussig, Günter de Bruyn, Martina Hefter, Wolfgang Hilbig, Tobias Hülswitt, Hanna Johansen, Hermann Kant, Judith Kuckart, and Leni Riefenstahl.
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Sarah Koellner received her Ph.D. in German Studies from Vanderbilt University in August 2018. Since then, she is a Visiting Assistant Professor at the College of Charleston. In Fall 2019, she will continue to work at CofC as an Assistant Professor of German. Her teaching and research interests focus on the intersection of literature, law, and politics and she has published on questions of identity, (self)censorship, and the value of privacy in the 21st century. Currently, she is working on a book project “(In)Visibility in Liquid Times: Towards a Collective Concept of Privacy,” which investigates how the understanding of privacy shifts from an individual right of the 19th century to a collective concept in the digital age.
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Barbara Kosta is currently the head of the Department of German Studies at the University of Arizona, where she teaches German cinema, twentieth-century and contemporary German literature and culture. Her most recent projects are a co-editing volume on Women Writing World War: From German Colonialism to World War I and an English translation of Judith Nika Pfeifer’s 2017 novel Violante.
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Vera K. Kostial is research associate at Professor Alexandra Pontzen’s chair for German Literature from the 18th to the 21st century, with a special focus on contemporary literature, and cultural media studies at the University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany. There, she works on her PhD project on reception processes of contemporary German political literature. Furthermore, her job includes coordinating the editorial office Gegenwartskulturen, which is part of the online magazine literaturkritik.de.
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Bethany Morgan is entering her fifth year in the Joint PhD Program of German and Comparative Literature at Washington University in St. Louis. Her dissertation addresses representations of the refugee figure in contemporary German literature, specifically in the works of Abbas Khider, Sherko Fatah and Jenny Erpenbeck. Her general German research interests are exile, migrant and refugee literature; and trauma, memory and discourse studies.
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Katrina Nousek’s research focuses on globalization, narrative studies, and contemporary literature. She is currently working on a book manuscript titled The Vanishing Point of the Future that analyzes futurity in literary migration narratives about postsocialism in Europe. Most recently, she delved into ecocriticism in a forthcoming article analyzing narrative indeterminacy and human and non-human natures in Ingo Schulze’s Simple Stories. She holds a PhD in German Studies from Cornell University, a BA in History and Literature from Harvard University, and is currently Visiting Assistant Professor of German Studies at the University Richmond.
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Maryanne Piel is a second-year PhD student in the Germanic Studies Department and a Teaching Assistant in the German Basic Language Program. In addition to her academic endeavors she worked as a project assistant at the Goethe-Institut Chicago and served as conference coordinator for the Austrian Studies Association Conference in 2016. Her research interests include early 20th century literature with a focus on the rise of celebrity culture, as well as socialist and proletarian literatures.
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Karen Rosenflanz is Associate Professor of Global, Cultural and Language Studies at the College of St. Scholastica in Duluth, Minnesota, where she teaches Russian and German language and culture, and contemporary European affairs. She is a specialist in early 20th Century Slavic Literature. Current projects include a translation of Evgeny Slutsky's Theory of Marginal Utility, media representations of the German-speaking minority in Romania, and a comparative study of media manipulation by Wladimir Kaminer and Viktor Pelevin.
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Steven Weinberg is a second-year PhD student in the German Department at Rutgers University with research interests including Kafka, German-Jewish studies, law, humor, and Nietzsche. He did his M.A. in Literature at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and wrote his thesis on Kafka’s novel Der Prozess and its connection to jurisprudence. Steven also received a J.D. from Temple University in 2012 and spent two years practicing law in a firm in Philadelphia.
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Julie Winter holds a PhD in German from Northwestern University and translates from German. She has translated three books of memoirs by members of the German resistance against Hitler, a collection of memoirs about the expulsion of Germans from the East after the Second World War, and a variety of literary essays and poems. Her translations have appeared in Asymptote, Words Without Borders, InTranslation and Ezra, among others. She is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor at Western Washington University in Bellingham, Washington.
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William Collins Donahue is the Rev. John J. Cavanaugh, C.S.C., Professor of the Humanities and Director of the Nanovic Institute for European Studies at the University of Notre Dame. He holds a Ph.D. in German literature from Harvard University and is an internationally recognized scholar of contemporary German literature and film. He is the author of numerous books and articles, including Holocaust as Fiction: Bernhard Schlink’s “Nazi” Novels and their Films and The End of Modernism: Elias Canetti’s Auto-da-Fé. He is currently working on a book project on Elias Canetti’s literary legacy and is studying Holocaust literature by exploring an an analogy with Stolpersteine--small pavement stones throughout Europe that commemorate Holocaust victims.
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Martin Kagel is associate dean of the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Georgia, and holds the A. G. Steer professorship in the Department of Germanic & Slavic Studies, which he served for ten years as department head. He earned a Ph.D. in German from the University of Wisconsin-Madison a Master’s degree in German and Theatre from the Freie Universität Berlin. His research focuses primarily on eighteenth and twentieth-century German literature and culture.
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