2023 Cohort
Joshua Aelick is an MFA candidate in Poetry at North Carolina State University. Their current projects include a translation of German-American poet Theodor Kirchhoff--whose grappling with home and alienation is in conversation with Joshua's own work--and the building out of a vegan poetic. Joshua is a recipient of the Guy Owen Memorial Scholarship in Creative Writing, and their fiction has won honors in the Writers of the Future competition. Outside of writing, Joshua is a birdwatcher and disc golfer.
|
Jocelyn Aksin is a Lecturer in the German Program at the University of North Carolina Greensboro specializing in Turkish-German Studies with a focus on shared memory cultures between Turkey and Germany. At UNCG, Jocelyn teaches courses in the German language sequence as well as upper-level topics courses in German. She also regularly offers a seminar on banned books in the UNCG Honors College and an introductory seminar on literary translation that enrolls students from a variety of language backgrounds. Jocelyn’s current project examines the history and reception of translations of Heinrich Heine’s work into Turkish.
|
Karin Baumgartner is Professor of German at the University of Utah and an affiliated member of Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies. Since January 2023, she also serves the co-editor of Die Unterrichtspraxis/Teaching German. Her research interests include German literature and culture in the 18th and 19th centuries, feminist and gender studies, travel literature, Swiss Studies, and the digital Humanities. She is the author of Public Voices: Political Discourse in the Writings of Caroline de la Motte Fouqué (2009) and the co-editor of From Multiculturalism to Cultural Hybridity: New Approaches to Teaching Modern Switzerland (2010) and Anxious Journeys: Contemporary German Travel Literature (2019). Her latest book on travel literature and national identity is currently under review.
|
Jason Doerre is a Senior Lecturer of German Studies at Trinity College in Hartford, CT. His research and teaching focuses on nineteenth and twentieth century cultural history and film studies. Most recently he has published on DEFA Film, Weimar Cinema, as well as the literature of German author Hermann Sudermann. He is currently working on several projects, one of which is a book manuscript that deals with pessimism and the liberal German intelligentsia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
|
Xiaoyao Guo is a PhD student in the German Department at Princeton University. He received his B.A. in German from Peking University. He holds an MA in German from the University of Oxford and an MA in History of Art with a concentration on modernist art from the Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London. His research takes up comparative and transmedial perspectives on literary, artistic, and cultural modernism in the European context, with a focus on the interactions between textual and visual traditions in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. He is especially interested in the temporality, spatiality, and narrativity of text and image as processes of mediation and subject formation.
|
Michael Hansen is a first year Master's student at the University of Oregon. His research focuses on the early 1900’s German publication Der Orchideengarten, a supernatural fiction journal that represents significant literary genre characteristics of the time. Specifically, he is researching the interaction of confrontation and passivity in what would become categorized as Weird fiction in the years following the end of the publication’s run.
|
Julia Keutmann (she/her) is a graduate student in her second year of the Master's program “Literatur- und Medienpraxis” and “British and Postcolonial Studies” at Universität Duisburg-Essen. She received her bachelor’s degree in Medienwissenschaften and Anglistik/Amerikanistik at Ruhr-Universität Bochum. Her research interests include media systems and their regulation as well as British cultural studies and Romanticism.
|
Rachel Kirby is Associate Professor of German at Colorado State University, where she has taught since 1996. She holds a B.A. from Oberlin College, and the M.A. and Ph.D. from Washington University in St. Louis. Her primary responsibility at CSU is teaching. She teaches German language at all levels, literature and culture courses, cinema (DEFA, West German, Weimar era) courses at the fourth-year level, as well as capstone courses, such as Weimar Culture and Society. To reach a broader student audience, she has developed a course on The Holocaust in Literature and Film, the only course she teaches in English. Her research interests include German-Jewish cultural identity, the Weimar era, and Bauhaus ideals and aesthetics.
|
Tobias Lehmann is currently pursuing his Ph.D. in German Language and Literature at the University of Oregon in Eugene. His research focus is on 20th century Post-War and East German literature. He is writing his dissertation on the idea of home and memory in contemporary East German novels and memoirs. He has published research articles on the representation of division and unification in East German memoirs, art as a means of resistance, translation theories, and German language teaching. Current interests include Holocaust memoirs, autofiction, poetry, and critical theory. He has also translated a book of poems into German.
|
Katherine (Katie) Lightfoot will begin her PhD in German Studies in August of 2023 at Georgetown University. She received her BA and MA from The University of Alabama, where she also taught Elementary German. Her research interests include migration studies and transnational literature published in the German-speaking world, as well as second-language acquisition and reflective teaching and learning.
|
Beth Ann Muellner is Professor of German and Chair of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the College of Wooster in Ohio where she also contributes to Global Media and Digital Studies and the Museum Studies Pathway. Her interdisciplinary and feminist research interests revolve around autobiographical writing and biography, spatial studies, visual culture, memory studies, with a focus on nineteenth-century and early-twentieth century women writers. She is currently working on the collaborative writing of royal women writers Carmen Sylva and Mite Kremnitz. Berlin remains near and dear: she lived there from 1988-1992, where she studied Germanistik at the Freie Universität and completed the Zwischen-prüfung before returning to the U.S. for graduate school.
|
Nancy Nenno (she/her/hers//sie/ihr) is Professor of German Studies at the College of Charleston in Charleston, SC, where she teaches all levels of language, film, and culture, as well as courses in English in film and Diaspora Studies. Her research focuses on the intersection of race, gender, and nationality in the cinema and literature of German-speaking cultures of the 20th and 21st centuries. Her most recent work explores self-representations of Black Austrians as well as the histories of former Vertragsarbeiter*innen from Mozambique and Vietnam in the GDR.
|
John Pizer is Professor of German and Comparative Literature at Louisiana State University in the Department of World Literatures, Languages & Cultures. From 2011-2019 he was the chair of what was then the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures. He is the author of six books and some eighty articles and book chapters. His area of specialty is 18th-21st century German literature and thought, with occasional forays into the Baroque and Comparative Literature. His most recent book, Ambivalent Literary Farewells to the German Democratic Republic, was published by Walter de Gruyter in 2021. This work examines dissatisfaction with the process of German reunification and its aftermath as expressed in imaginative literature from shortly after the dissolution of the German Democratic Republic to the present day.
|
Landon Reitz (he/him) is a Visiting Assistant Professor of German Studies at the University of Cincinnati where he also directs the German Language Program. He holds a concurrent PhD in German and Medieval Studies from the University of California, Berkeley. His dissertation analyzed the representation of reading in medieval and modern German literature. His current research projects explore digital modes of reading, medieval mystical practices, medieval conceptualizations of the future, and contemporary German-languages narratives of migration.
|
Kathy Weingand heads the German department at both Cabrillo College in Aptos, CA and Merced College in Merced, CA and is also an online German Instructor with the UCScout program at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She has a BA in both sociology and German and an MA in German literature and teaching methods from San Francisco State University. She taught German, ESL, PE, and social studies for decades at Sequoia High School in Redwood City, CA and has now gone on to teach German at the college level at the two different colleges and UC, Santa Cruz. During school vacations, Kathy is also a program leader for CIEE, the Council On International Educational Exchange, leading programs in Berlin and London. She specializes in communicative language teaching approaches. This year, Kathy was the recipient of the Goethe-Institut / AATG Certificate of Merit.
|
Anna Wollenschläger (she/her/hers) is a Ph.D. Candidate at the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures at Johns Hopkins University, having received her M.A. in German Literature and Philosophy from the University of Hamburg on the concept of Non-Identity in Nietzsche and Adorno. In her dissertation, she examines multidimensional narrative textures in works of Heinrich von Kleist, Franz Kafka, Ingeborg Bachmann, and Elfriede Jelinek, specifically focusing on their potential to perform non-fixing and non-possessive modes of representation. Her further research interests include feminist and queer studies, critical theory, French philosophy and psychoanalytical approaches, as well as experimental writing within philosophy and literature.
|