2022 Cohort
Lauren Beck is a PhD candidate in German Studies at the University of Michigan. Her dissertation considers how gender, intergenerational discourses, and histories of Eastern European communism intersect in contemporary German literature. Her research interests include narratives of migration, gender, temporality, and cultural connections between Germany and Eastern Europe.
|
Tommy Bell is Adjunct Faculty and Coordinator of the First-Year German Language Program at the University of Denver. Previously, he was a German Lecturer at North Dakota State University. He received his PhD in German Studies from the University of Washington. He also attended Princeton Theological Seminary where he received his Master of Divinity. His research interests include Religion and Literature, Adorno and Musil.
|
Franzi Finkenstein (she/her or they/them) is currently pursuing her PhD in Germanic Languages & Literatures including a Graduate Certificate in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the Washington University in St. Louis. Franzi studied in Marburg, Freiburg, and London, and occasionally works as a freelance journalist. Franzi's research interests encompass feminist and queer methodology and the examination of gender, genre, and performance, as well as complexities concerning identity, representation, and subjectivity in life writings by German-Jewish women writers and visual artists. Alongside Thao Ho, Franzi is the editor of Weak zine. Their first issue on "Music x Mental Health" came out in April 2021. The next issue will be on “Demons”.
|
Heidi Grek is a Visiting Assistant Professor of German in the World Languages, Literatures, and Cultures Department at College of the Holy Cross. She holds a doctorate degree in Germanic Languages and Literatures and Comparative Literature from Washington University in St. Louis. Her research interests include Goethe, the European epic tradition, and world literature. She continues to develop the comparative readings from her dissertation of Faust and Paradise Lost, The Divine Comedy, and Byron’s Don Juan.
|
Ruth V. Gross is Professor of German and head of the Department of Languages and Literatures at North Carolina State University. She studied German and Comparative Literature at Northwestern and received her PhD from Yale University. She is the author and editor of numerous books and articles dealing with German and Austrian literature of the 20th century, particularly on the works of Franz Kafka, but also Thomas Mann, Stefan Zweig, and Albert Drach, among others. Her recent “guilty pleasure” is reading the entire sequence of murder mysteries in the Sarah-Pauli series by Austrian writer Beate Maxian.
|
Esther Kondo Heller (she/they) is a Kenyan-German poet, writer, and experimental filmmaker. They are a Barbican Young Poet 18/19, an Obsidian Foundation fellow, Ledbury Critic, and Image Text Ithaca 2022 Junior Fellow. They approach the filmmaking process as a poet. They focus on layering and unfurling to articulate memory, resonance, and language. They are particularly interested in Static as a portal of recollection, communion, and an archive of history. Their films have been selected and screened at the Berlinale Expanded Forum Programme, Zebra Poetry Festival and at the ICA London. They are currently an MFA in Poetry candidate at Cornell University and co-host the radio show, Poetic Healing with Zen and Kondo on THFradio Berlin.
|
Christina McDade heads the German department at Diablo Valley College in Pleasant Hill, California. Her BA and MA in German are from the University of Hawaii at Manoa, where she also taught many years before moving to the mainland. Her Master's thesis focused on the hard-won successes of Germany's first female medical doctor, Dr. Dorothea Erxleben, through a modern, feminist lens. Christina's general German studies interests currently include autogenic training, migrant literature, and non-binary neopronouns.
|
Doris McGonagill received her PhD in Germanic Languages and Literatures from Harvard University. She now holds a position as Associate Professor of German at Utah State University. Her interdisciplinary research focuses on the intersection between German literature, the visual arts, aesthetic theory, and memory theory in the 20th and 21st centuries. More recently, she has ventured into the fields of German environmental literature and ecocriticism.
|
Erika Nelson Mukherjee is Associate Professor of German Studies and the new Director of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies at Union College in Schenectady, New York, where she teaches German cinema, twentieth-century and contemporary German literature, culture, and film, as well as classes on Narrative Medicine, Grief, and Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies. Her research has focused on Rilke’s poetry, retellings of the Orpheus myth, migration literature and film, systemic constellation work, and the representation of girls in multimedia. She’s currently working on a book about author and filmmaker Doris Dörrie’s work on creative writing, Buddhism, and grief.
|
Traci S. O’Brien is Associate Professor of German and Chair of the Department of World Languages, Literatures and Cultures at Auburn University. In addition to her research on literary/cultural topics, she devotes herself frequently to pedagogical topics. Recent publications have focused on Czech-German authors H.G. Adler and Lenka Reinerová, as well as bridging the gap between students’ proficiency levels in upper-level content courses, the importance of assessment strategies for graduate student teachers, and the value of defining culture and intercultural competence for undergraduate language learners.
|
Cynthia D. Porter (she/her) is a Ph.D. candidate completing a joint degree in German and Comparative Media Analysis and Practice (CMAP) from Vanderbilt University. She received her B.A. in German Studies from Denison University (2010), a Master’s in German Studies (2013) from Bowling Green State University, as well as a Master’s in Popular Culture (2015) from the same institution. Cynthia’s research interests fall under the categories of cross-media studies with a focus on the depiction of the body in German canonized literature and contemporary film, the body-mind connection in relation to body modification, the presentation of German history and heritage in popular American film, and Afro-German Studies. Her dissertation examines the history of tattooing in the wake of moments of perceived cultural rupture and transition in German twentieth- and twenty-first century history. Cynthia is presently a visiting instructor of German at her alma mater, Denison University, and will defend her dissertation this summer.
|
Daniel P. Reynolds is Seth Richards Professor in Modern Languages at Grinnell College, Iowa, where he has taught since 1998 in the Department of German Studies. He holds his PhD in Germanic Languages and Literatures from Harvard University. His book, Postcards from Auschwitz. Holocaust Tourism and the Meaning of Remembrance (NYU Press, 2018) explores how tourism to sites of Holocaust perpetration and remembrance in Poland, Germany, Israel, and the United States contributes to new and diverse modes of collective memory that merit careful analysis. His other research interests include German literature and culture from the late 19th century to the present, and the legacies of German colonialism, particularly through literature that recalls the genocide of the Nama and Herero people.
|
Hans J. Rindisbacher is a Professor of German Studies at Pomona College. His research focuses on the intersection of perception, notably the sense of smell, and its textual encodings; and on the representation and communication of sensory experience/ embodiment in general. He published The Smell of Books: A Cultural-Historical Study of Olfactory Perception in Literature (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1992), a pathbreaking study of literary olfactory representations, and articles on the roles of perfumery and cosmetics in the Nazi era, a study of a neglected source for Patrick Süskind’s 1985 bestseller Perfume, and writings on fashion and photography. Rindisbacher is also interested in Swiss literature within German studies in the USA and published on time in Max Frisch, masculinity in Hermann Burger, and politics and theater in Friedrich Dürrenmatt. In 2019 he co-edited, with Peter C. Meilaender, Writing Switzerland: Culture, History, and Politics in the Work of Peter von Matt.
|
Andrea Schmidt is a Visiting Assistant Professor of German and a Core faculty member of Gender and Sexuality Studies at St. Olaf College in Northfield, MN. She teaches courses in film, German cultures, media and the environment, and gender. She has published recently on Angela Merkel impersonations and an Interwar German film adaptation of Little Dorrit. Her research interests include heritage cultures, German media industries, and literary adaptations.
|
Nora Schulte-Zweckel is a graduate student in her first year of the Master program “Literatur und Medienpraxis” and “American Studies” at Universität Duisburg-Essen. She received her bachelor’s degree in
“Kommunikationswissenschaft” and “Anglophone Studies”. Her research interests include seriality as well as media and literature in popular culture. |
Martin Sheehan, Interim Chair of the Department of Foreign Languages and Associate Professor of German at Tennessee Tech University, holds a Ph.D. in Germanic Literatures and Languages from the University of Virginia. His research on dramatic form and performance has been featured in Seminar, Archiv, and Studia Neophilogica. More recently, he has explored photography and visual culture: along with Carrie Collenberg-Gonzalez, he co-edited Moving Frames: Photographs in German Cinema (Berghahn Books, 2022), and his work on group photography rituals has appeared in Colloquia Germanica. A member of the digital humanities research collective at Vanderbilt University since 2016, his current projects explore algorithmic poesis, social network analysis, as well as visuality and disability in German dramatic comedy.
|
Gabriela Stoicea (she/her) holds a Ph.D. in German from Yale University and is currently Associate Professor of German at Clemson University. Her research focuses on processes of identity and knowledge formation at the intersection of literature, science, philosophy, film, and politics. Her first monograph, published in 2020, uses a multidisciplinary approach to offer a constellation of ideas and polemics surrounding the readability of the human body between the late 18th and the early 20th centuries. Gabriela has also published articles on Sophie von La Roche, Robert Musil, Fritz Lang, and Claude Lanzmann, and she is the recipient of many competitive research grants.
|
Birgit Tautz is the George Taylor Files Professor of German at Bowdoin College where she also contributes to Cinema Studies and ventures, on occasion, into Digital Humanities. While most of her publications are on the long eighteenth-century, including two books and a co-edited, forthcoming volume on eighteenth-century networks, she is broadly interested in German-language literature in a global perspective, translation, and post-1945 film and has also extensively published in these areas. She is currently working on a chapter on Olivia Wenzel's 1000 Serpentinen Angst between autofiction and archive.
|
Susan Wansink is Professor of German Studies and Chair of the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures at Virginia Wesleyan University, and avid Berlin enthusiast. Her areas of teaching and research include fall of the Wall and post fall of the Wall Berlin in film and literature. She recently translated the novel Kenton Blau: Die Leipziger Tagebücher 1986-1987 (The Sound behind the Wall: An East German Underground Story) by Kai Reininghaus. Berlin remains her intellectual and artistic inspiration.
|
Veronica Williamson is a PhD candidate in the Germanic Languages and Literatures Department at the University of Michigan with research interests in migration studies and multilingualism in contemporary literature published in Germany. She also is a fellow in the Museum Studies Program at the University of Michigan. Her dissertation focuses on collaborative initiatives in Germany that prioritize multilingual participation as a means of engaging with recent migrants and refugees — for example the Weiter Schreiben publishing initiative and the Multaka: Treffpunkt Museum tours. In doing so, she hopes to engage with discourses that contest and reframe conceptions of Germany’s pasts, presents, and futures as rooted in a mono-linguistic or monolithic culture.
|