Robert C. Abbott Jr. received his B.A. in 2004 from St. John’s College—a Great Books school—with majors in Philosophy and the History of Science and Mathematics, and minors in Classical Studies and Comparative Literature. In 2006 he joined the Committee on Social Thought to think about the relationship between poetry and philosophy, exemplified in the work of Hölderlin and Hegel. In 2008 he joined the Department of Germanic Studies to pursue a joint degree, and received his M.A. there in 2010. The theme of his comprehensive exam is the German literary reception of Greek culture after Winckelmann. His potential dissertation topic, prompted by the end of Rilke’s Erste Duineser Elegie, is the origin of poetry in mourning: einst in der Klage um Linos / wagende erste Musik dürre Erstarrung durchdrang.
Email: rcabbott@uchicago.edu

Martin Bäumel holds an M.A. in German Literature from the University of Alabama and an M.A. in History from the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München. His dissertation on the situational pragmatics of poetry examines texts from 1700 to 1770. In it, he seeks to write a history of the emergence of the lyric genre and account for the shifting field of possibilities for poetic utterances and their semantic and semiotic effects. Other areas of interest include historical semantics, textual processes of differentiation and narrative theory with a focus on the 17th to the 19th century. His translation of essays by Jurek Becker appeared in April 2010, and an article on the observation of part and whole as a strategy for writing and reading in Alexander von Humboldt’s travel narratives is forthcoming.
Email: mbaeumel@uchicago.edu

Mirjam Berg studied German Literature and Political Science on the University of Bonn where she graduated with a Magister in the summer of 2010. Her final thesis was on “Die poetologische Bedeutung des Spaziergangs in den Texten „Der Spaziergang“ von Robert Walser (1917), „Gehen“ von Thomas Bernhard (1971) und „(Krieg und Welt)“ von Peter Waterhouse (2006).“ After her graduation, she spent a year at the German Graduate Program of Johns Hopkins University as a visiting student. Her research interests focus on the poetological meaning of space and motion, particularly in 20th century and contemporary literature. Mirjam is also interested in intermedial theories of narration of literature, film, and theater, as well as in the interface of literature, philosophy, and political science in the contexts of aesthetics and theories of language.
Email: mirjamberg@uchicago.edu

Joshua Clemente Bonilla received his B.A. in 2001 from Princeton University. His dissertation project, "Transubstantiating the Stage: Calderón and the Invention of a German Romantic Drama," explores the German 'discovery' of Golden Age Spanish theater and subsequent Romantic reinventions of staged illusion, audience affect and literary religiosity in the works of Ludwig Tieck, the Schlegel brothers, Goethe and Joseph von Eichendorff. His reading of this so-called ‘Calderonism’ considers in detail the oft-neglected influences of Cervantes, Lope de Vega and Calderón's Eucharist plays. Additional research interests include Baroque theatricality, Catholic drama, Spanish Romanticism and postwar German film. He has also designed and taught courses on 20th-century drama, postwar film and German literature from Romanticism to the Revolutions of 1848.
Email: bonilla@uchicago.edu

Hannah Vandegrift Eldridge completed her B.A. in German at the University of California, Berkeley in 2006.  She joined the department in Chicago in the same year, and subsequently received her M.A. in 2007 with an exam on the history of poetics from Opitz to Celan. She is currently working on a dissertation titled “Anxiety and Acknowledgment: Lyric Poetry and the Truth of Skepticism,” in which she will read the two poets in terms of the dynamic of skeptical thought explicated by the American philosopher Stanley Cavell in order to elucidate their participation in the paradigmatically modern project of characterizing the disposition of the human. She has a strong secondary interest in music and musicology, especially the relationship between sound and text. She currently holds a Mellon Foundation—University of Chicago dissertation completion fellowship and is an affiliated doctoral fellow at the Franke Institute for the Humanities.
Email: hveldrid@uchicago.edu

Peter Erickson joined the Germanic Studies Department in 2008, following a DAAD study grant at the Universität Konstanz and an Austrian Fulbright teaching assistantship in Vienna. His undergraduate thesis focused on the aesthetics of bureaucracy in the work of Franz Kafka. He is currently interested in the intersection of German literature and the visual arts around 1800. Recent projects have included work on Hegel’s account of the origin of architecture, the uncanny in the lithographs of Theodore Géricault, and the religious element of German Romantic art criticism. His dissertation explores the influence of religious conversion narrative on the early Bildungsroman. He recently presented at conferences at Cornell University and at the Friedrich Schlegel Gesellschaft at the Universität Mainz.
Email: psericks@uchicago.edu

Jake Fraser graduated from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill in 2010 with a B.A. in Economics and Contemporary European Studies. He spent the 2010-2011 semester studying at Berlin’s Humboldt Universität on a DAAD graduate study grant, entering the German Department at the University of Chicago in the fall of 2011. Drawing upon a bricolage of structuralist and post-structuralist thought, psychoanalysis and narratology, his research interests are centered around the intersection of media theory, semiotics and rhetoric. His current research is concerned with the temporality of (re-)reading and perception, particularly with regard to retroactive modifications of meaning in the mind of the reader. Related interests include the history of criticism, film theory and the history of hermeneutics.
Email: frasermj@uchicago.edu

David R. Greeves has completed degrees at New York University (B.A. in Comparative Literature and German) and at the Freie Universität Berlin (M.A. in Allgemeiner und Vergleichender Literaturwissenschaft and Anglistik). He currently resides in Berlin and is working on his dissertation: "Patterns of Poetic Absorption in German Lyric Poetry, 1750-1780." His dissertation explores the development of modes of intimate communication in the Age of Herder and their influence in the emergence of the concept of authenticity. His other interests include Early German cinema, children's literature and the history of the decline of classical rhetoric. Concerning the latter, he has published an essay entitled: "Kritik der Rhetorik am Ende des 18. Jahrhunderts: Das Verhältnis zwischen Rhetorik und Philosophy bei Kant" Stuttgart 2000.
Email: drgreeve@midway.uchicago.edu

After receiving a BA from Bard College and working as a publications editor for Berlin’s KW Institute and the Manifesta7 biennial, Stephen Haswell Todd came to Chicago to pursue German Studies in the comparative tradition. A reluctant rhetorician at heart, he questions to what extent we might talk about our ethical practices without recourse to formal classifications of grammar, gesture, tone. His methods derive from classic literary theory and philosophy of language; they test their validity upon discourses around ethics, economics, poetry, psychology. As of this writing his projects include a philosophical history of autism, an analysis of self-government in Baroque verse, and a close interlocution of Arendt and Blanchot. In winter he keeps ice skates in the office, only wishing it were colder out.
Email: sht@uchicago.edu

Greg Hedin joined the Department of Germanic Studies in the fall of 2008. Before that, he spent a year on a Fulbright Scholarship at the Georg-August-Universität in Göttingen, where he did research on 20th century poetics, especially of the Prager Schule. In Göttingen, he also began a project on the history of "Erzähltheorie." Poetics and literary theory have been an interest of his throughout his academic career. He wrote his BA thesis on Friedrich Schlegel’s theory of the novel and Goethe’s Wahlverwandtschaften at Amherst College. These themes were continued in the completion of his MA in the spring of 2009. He is currently working on a dissertation project on the narrative poetics of the 17th century. Hopefully he will be able to incorporate some of the lessons of his foray into narratology, but it remains to be seen.
Email: gmhedin@uchicago.edu

Georginna Hinnebusch received her B.A. from Yale University. She joined the department in 2006 after studying extensively in Germany and received her M.A. from the University of Chicago in the spring of 2007. Her interests include Weimar Classicism, early German Romanticism and Aesthetics, focusing particular attention on the productive interface between literature and philosophy. She is currently working on a dissertation that attempts to reinterpret Goethe’s insights on ‘Bildung.’ Taking her point of departure from Goethe’s conception of the natural production of organic forms as well as his thoughts on the mimetic creation of artistic forms, she seeks to elaborate the process of human development as a dynamic interplay between form and intuition by embedding it in the tradition of philosophical perfectionism.
Email: georginna@uchicago.edu

Maeve Hooper graduated from Reed College in 2009 with a B.A. in German Literature. In 2007-2008 she was the recipient of a DAAD undergraduate scholarship to research literary pictorialism in Munich. Maeve wrote her senior thesis at Reed on the integration of technology in the early twentieth century and First World War as portrayed in Thomas Mann’s Der Zauberberg, and Ernst Jünger’s In Stahlgewittern. After graduating, Maeve spent a year as a Fulbright Teaching Assistant in Baden-Württemberg, where she taught English at a local high school. In 2011, Maeve was awarded an M.A. in Germanic Studies at the University of Chicago. She is interested in continuing to examine the depiction of WWI in literature and other artistic media, and has recently been working closely with Ernst Friedrich’s shocking post-war photographic compilation, “Krieg dem Kriege!” 
Email: hooperm@uchicago.edu

Tamara Kamatović received her BA in December, 2010 from the University of Missouri-Kansas City. In 2008-2009, she studied at the University of Leipzig on a DAAD undergraduate scholarship. Her interests include early modernity and expressionism, as well as post-war Austrian literature, particularly the works of Thomas Bernhard and Peter Handke. Her critical and theoretical interests have been inspired by German Idealism, the Frankfurt School, and Freudian psychoanalysis and she has, more recently, further broadened the field of her engagement with literature through Foucauldian discourse-theoretical readings. She hopes to continue her investment in interdisciplinary scholarship at the University of Chicago and to broaden her critical perspective to include and reflect upon historically accurate and critically consistent topographical readings of literary texts.
Email: tkamatovic@uchicago.edu

Marcus Lampert graduated from Princeton University in 2007 with a BA in German Literature. He joined the department in 2009, following a year studying in Berlin on a Fulbright study fellowship. At Princeton, he wrote his senior thesis on the relationship between Walter Benjamin's books "Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels" and "Einbahnstrasse." Marcus continues to explore his interest in the German Baroque that began with his reading of Walter Benjamin and is gradually filling in his knowledge of German literary history from Martin Opitz through to the Romantics. He is particularly interested in tracking semantic and poetological developments from the early modern period, through the Englightenment, into Romanticism. Additionally, he hopes to use Niklas Luhmann’s Systems Theory in literary analysis.

Anthony Mahler received his B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania in 2006 and his M.A. from the University of Chicago in 2010. He has also studied at the Universität Konstanz, the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, and the Freie Universität Berlin. He is currently working on his dissertation, which is a literary and cultural history of dietetics around 1800. From antiquity through the nineteenth century, dietetics was the discipline for leading a healthy life. The dissertation focuses on how old-European dietetic concepts and practices surprisingly shaped regimens of media consumption and production in the epoch that saw the emergence of modern literature. Anthony's research interests include German literature of the long eighteenth century, rhetoric and genre poetics, media studies with a focus on the history of reading, and the methods and history of the humanities.
Email: aemahler@uchicago.edu

Malika Maskarinec received her B.A. in Philosophy and German Literature from Reed College in 2005. She spent the following year in Germany on a Fulbright Fellowship and then joined the Department of Germanic Studies at the University of Chicago in the fall of 2006, where she received her M.A. She is currently working on a dissertation with the preliminary title: "Body, City, and Text: Spaces of Einfühlung in German Aesthetics and Literature between 1900 and 1930." This project traces empathy as a mode of aesthetic engagement and spatial animation in German Modernism. Other interests include post-war film, particularly the Heimatfilm, and theories of realism in literature and film. She is currently a visiting student at the Friedrich Schlegel Graduiertenschule at the Freie Universität Berlin.
Email: maskarinec@uchicago.edu

James McCormick completed a B.A. at Yale University in 2003 and joined the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago in 2004. In 2006, a growing interest in German literature led him to join the Department of Germanic Studies as well. His dissertation reflects this interdisciplinary spirit by seeking both to be a contribution to current philosophical debates on theories of narrative and subjectivity and to offer a narratological reading of representations of subjectivity in the work of Robert Musil. In addition to the themes of this project, his interests include literary modernism, ethical and aesthetic philosophy, and the interaction of time and narrative. He has presented work at conferences at Johns Hopkins University and Cornell University. When not in the library, he is likely to be found in his kitchen.
Email: jmccorm@uchicago.edu

Robert Neiser studied in Bonn and St. Andrews and graduated from Bonn University in 2008 with an M.A. in German Literary Studies and Medieval and Modern History. In his thesis, he worked on Gotthold Ephraim Lessing's dramatic work and the concept of gift exchange as developed by Marcel Mauss. During his studies at Bonn and St Andrews, Robert was mainly interested in early modern and 18th-century literature and thinking, with a strong focus on Lessing and Goethe. While at Bonn, he worked for the Emmy Noether-Forschungsgruppe "Kulturgeschichte des Menschenversuchs" under the direction of Nicolas Pethes. An interest in anthropology has also developed from this engagement. Robert is currently preparing for his Ph.D. exams. He plans to work on "the long 19th century" and the concept of subjectivity.
E-mail: rneiser@uchicago.edu

Bastian Reinert studied German and North American Literature as well as History at the FU Berlin, the University College London and the Washington Univ. in St. Louis, where he received his M.A. in 2006. Before joining the department in 2007, he taught tutorials on the epistolary novel, Büchner, Bachmann, and Celan at the FU. His research interests include Jewish-German literature, intertextuality, and narratology. He is currently working on a dissertation on the posthumous voice, focussing on Beckett and Jelinek. Forthcoming in the summer of 2011 is his first book: "'Wir taten ein Schweigen darüber': Intertextualität als Zeugenschaft in Paul Celans 'Engführung'" (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann). He most recently published a book chapter on Droste-Hülshoff's verse play 'Des Arztes Vermächtniß' and a couple of reviews.
Email: bastianreinert@uchicago.edu

Leigh Ann Smith-Gary received her B.A. from Princeton in German and Political Theory and her M.A. from Chicago in 2006. In 2004-2005, she was the recipient of a DAAD Fellowship to Berlin, where she completed a study on the poetry of Sascha Anderson and Bert Papenfuß-Gorek. She is currently an associate of the Graduiertenkolleg "Das Reale in der Kultur der Moderne" at the Universität Konstanz and is at work on a dissertation entitled: "Auf Schleichwegen. Modulations of the Sublime in Nineteenth-Century German Realism," which focuses on Adalbert Stifter, Wilhelm Raabe, Gottfried Keller and Friedrich Theodor Vischer. Her research interests include the aesthetics of the ugly, capricious narration, the poetics of sensibility and the rise of the novel in the nineteenth century. An article on the poetics of the border in Alexander von Humboldt's travel writing is forthcoming.
Email: lasg@uchicago.edu

Amy Stebbins graduated from Harvard University in 2007 with an B.A. in History and Literature. Her Honors thesis examined the ideological and structural underpinnings of Brecht's Berliner Ensemble as a model for The National Theatre in London (1962-1973). Amy moved to Berlin in 2007 as a Fulbright Scholar, during which time she worked with René Pollesch, Sebastian Baumgarten, Stefan Pucher, Chris Kondek and Frank Castorf at the Volksbühne and Maxim Gorki Theater. Her subsequent work as a director, producer, dramaturge, video-artist and performer took her to Berlin, Brussels, New York, Paris, Boston and London. In 2011, Amy was awarded an M.A. in Germanic Studies at the University of Chicago. Her current academic work deals in part with practical intersections of music, theater and film; she is also fascinated by the dynamic relationship between art and politics. Amy is a dramaturgy fellow of the Deutsche Bank Foundation's Akademie Musiktheater Heute.
Email: amystebbins@uchicago.edu

Andrea Wald studied German, English, and Theater, Film, and Media Studies in Vienna and Cambridge. In 2007 she received a Mag. (equivalent MA) in German and English from the University of Vienna (thesis title: Masken des Signifikanten. Subjekt und Begehren in Irmgard Keuns "Gilgi - Eine von uns" und "Das kunstseidene Mädchen" sowie Marieluise Fleißers "Eine Zierde für den Verein"). In 2011 she received a Mag. in Theater, Film, and Media Studies from the University of Vienna (thesis title: R3: Political Bodies between Re-Petition, Re-Signation, and Re-Signification). Andrea's current research is located at the intersection of early 20th century literature, aesthetic theory and philosophy.
Email: awald@uchicago.edu

Mimmi Woisnitza joined the Department in 2007. Her dissertation with the title "Dramaturgies of the Imagination in Lessing and Kleist" examines the impact that ongoing debates about the function of the imagination within aesthetic processes had on theater practices in the eighteenth century. She argues that far from merely representing imaginative conflicts on the level of the plot, Lessing and Kleist's dramas reflect upon their own medial status by enacting the imaginative pitfalls that might accompany a visit at the theater. The project bears on a general interest in the mise-en-scène of aesthetic concepts and genre conventions in the performing arts, including opera and cinema, in order to revisit the terminological and conceptual legacies that contemporary theater and performance studies grapple with and to complicate the historical narratives of the development of modern drama. Further areas of academic interest include the history of aesthetics, inter-arts relations, and the history of genres.
Email: mwoisnitza@uchicago.edu

Joela Zeller studied at the Universities of Bonn, St. Andrews (Scotland), and the FU Berlin to receive her M.A. in German and English Literature in 2008. She is interested in 19th and 20th century literature, particularly where it intersects with anthropology. Main areas of study are German Jewish literature, classification systems & hybridity, literature of migration (in particular the German American experience), and theories of the monstrous. Her dissertation focuses on a selection of grotesques by Oskar Panizza, Hanns Heinz Ewers, Salomo Friedländer/Mynona, and Franz Kafka. It dissects their vegetal, animal and liminal human protagonists as they are undergoing transformations that subvert those very categories in the realm of language and sexuality; it also explores grotesque narration as a processualized genre.
Email: jmz@uchicago.edu