Current Graduate Students -- Recent Alumni/ae
Recent Alumni/ae
Hunter Bivens is starting as an assistant professor of literature at the University of California at Santa Cruz. He has recently published articles on Anna Seghers and Brigitte Reimann and is working on a project examining the aesthetics of social class, history, and the built environment in the former GDR.
Chris Brummer received his Ph.D. in 2001. He subsequently earned his J.D. at Columbia Law School in 2004 and was a Assistant Professor of Law at Vanderbilt University where he taught international business transactions and capital markets. He has since has been appointed full Professor at Georgetown University School of Law.
Temby Caprio is a Sector Advisor in the Division for Education, Health, and Population Policy in the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development. With respect to her job she writes, “I always say ‘I won the job-lottery!’”
Andrew Erwin received his Ph.D. in June 2011 and is currently Visiting Assistant Professor in the German Department at Bowdoin College.
Veronika Füchtner, Assistant Professor of German at Dartmouth College, studied German literature, media, history and political science at the Philipps-University in Marburg and the Free University in Berlin. She received her M.A. from Washington University in St. Louis and her Ph.D. from the University of Chicago (2002). Before coming to Dartmouth in the fall of 2002 she taught at John Carroll University in Cleveland. She has published articles on Herbert Marcuse, Alfred Döblin, Magnus Hirschfeld and on the state of German Studies in the US. She recently completed a book on the relation between psychoanalysis and culture in Berlin during the Weimar Republic, and is currently working on a new project titled The Racial Unconscious in 20th Century German Culture. Other research and teaching interests include history of science, multiculturalism, gender studies, drama, and film. She has received research grants from the American Psychoanalytic Association, the Deutsche Schillergesellschaft, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the American Council of Learned Societies and has served on the national steering committee of Women in German.
Mila Ganeva received her Ph.D. in 2000. She is Assistant Professor of German at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. Recent publications: articles on fashion photography, fashion journalism, mannequins, Weimar visual culture and film (Konfektionskomödie), Berlin film of the 1990s, and Judith Hermann. Her book "Women in Weimar Fashion: Discourses and Displays in German Culture" is forthcoming with Camden House in 2008.
Katja Garloff received her Ph.D. in 1997. She is Associate Professor of German and Humanities at Reed College in Portland, Oregon. Words from Abroad: Trauma and Displacement in Postwar German Jewish Writers, came out in 2005 with Wayne State University Press. She is currently working on a second book, tentatively entitled Mixed Feelings: Metaphors of Love in German Jewish Culture, 1780-1930. She was recently awarded a Milicent C. McIntosh Fellowship from the Woodrow Wilson Foundation.
Anna K. Gisbertz defended her dissertation “Stimmung – Leib – Sprache. Eine Konfiguration in der Wiener Moderne“ in May 2008. She is assistant professor (wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin) at the Universität Mannheim in Germany. Her teaching and research interests include 19th- and 20th-century literature, culture, and philosophy.
Matthew Heintzelman received his Ph.D. in 2000. His is curator of the Austria/Germany Study Center and Cataloguer of Rare Books at the Bush Center at St. John’s University in Collegeville, Minnesota.
Hillary Hope Herzog received her Ph.D. in Winter, 2001. She has held visiting positions at the University of Illinois at Chicago, DePaul University, and the University of Cincinnati. In the fall of 2002, she began teaching at the University of Kentucky, Lexington.
Todd Herzog received his Ph.D. in 2001. He is Associate Professor of German at the University of Cincinnati. He is co-editor (along with Sander Gilman) of A New Germany in a New Europe (Routledge, 2001) and the forthcoming volume Jewish Identity and Jewish Writing in Germany and Austria Today (along with Hillary Hope Herzog and Benjamin Lapp). He has written articles on the image of America in recent German-Jewish literature, theories of biological and cultural hybridity, the role of film in criminal investigation and the modernist case history. His book entitled Crime Stories: Criminal and Society in Weimar Germany is due out in 2007.
Darren Ilett received his Ph.D. in August 2007. He is Assistant Professor at Michigan State University. His dissertation was entitled “Unavowable Strangeness: Narrating Queer Desire in Turn-of-the-Century Boarding School Fiction.” His research interests include turn-of-the-century literature and culture, film studies, queer studies, gender studies, and transnational German literature.
Joel Lande received his Ph.D in October 2010 and is currently a postdoctoral fellow in the research unit "eikones" at the University of Basel, Switzerland.
Kym Lanzetta received her Ph.D. in December 2008 and is currently living in Chicago.
Michael Latham received his Ph.D. in Spring, 1999 and has spent several years teaching in the German Department of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.
Katharina Loew received her joint Ph.D. in Cinema and Media Studies and Germanic Studies in 2011. Her dissertation was concerned with the impact of special effect technologies on German film during the silent era. She is currently an assistant professor in German and Cinema Studies at the University of Oregon.
Cecilia Novero received her Ph.D. in 2000. She is Assistant Professor of German, Comparative Literature, and Women’s Studies at Pennsylvania State University. Her book, From Futurist Fast Food to Eat Art: Anti-Diets of the Avant-garde, is forthcoming from University of Minnesota Press. She has published articles in journals and art catalogs on Dada, Cinema, German popular cookbooks and Nutritional Texts, as well as the contemporary artist Daniel Spoerri.
Amanda Norton received her PhD in December 2010. She is Strategist/Planner in the Office of the Dean of the Biological Sciences and the Pritzker Medical School at the University of Chicago.
Ashley Passmore is a Visiting Assistant Professor of German at The University of Portland, where she teaches Austrian and German cultural studies, film and German-Jewish literature. She is currently editing her dissertation on Darwinism in German Jewish literature into a book manuscript. In 2007, Ashley completed an NEH funded collaborative grant project to translate and publish Karl Marx's "Writings on Non-Western Cultures," which followed her translation of the writings of Rosa Luxemburg with Kevin Anderson of Purdue University, published as "The Rosa Luxemburg Reader" by The Monthly Review Press in 2004. Her newest project explores German Jewish travel writing to Israel in the 20th century.
Anke Pinkert received her Ph.D. in 2000 with a dissertation on Literary Intellectuals and the East German State. She is Associate Professor of German and Cinema Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. During the 2001-2002 academic year, she was a Gilles Whiting postdoctoral fellow at the University of Chicago. Her book Film and Memory in East Germany is forthcoming with Indiana University Press (2008). She has published articles in journals on East German literature, postwar and post-Holocaust representations, postcolonial discourse, as well as gender, trauma, and postwar film. Currently, she is working on a book project that examines travel and displacement in postcommunist literature.
Elisa Primavera-Levy received
her Ph.D. in October 2009 and is currently living in Berlin. She will be
a research fellow at the IFK (Internationales Forschungszentrum
Kulturwissenschaften/
Michael Sosulski received his Ph.D. in 1999. He is Associate Professor of German at Kalamazoo College in Kalamazoo, Michigan. His book Theater and Nation in Eighteenth-Century Germany appeared with Ashgate Press in April 2007. He continues to work on the idea of German nationhood as a performed identity further into the 19th and 20th centuries, in theater, youth organizations (precursors to the Hitler Youth), and in film.
Catherine Sprecher defended her dissertation "The Ecstasy of Influence: Life Writing in the Works of Bettine von Arnim and Mary Shelley" in April 2008. In this study, she shows how Bettine von Arnim and Mary Shelley write the lives of Goethe and Percy Shelley respectively by creating a new mode of life-writing. She describes this new mode of writing as an ecstatic embrace of different voices: Arnim and Shelley give a voice to the dead even as they open a space in which they can articulate their own subjectivity.
John Urang (Ph.D. 2005) is an assistant professor at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Worcester, MA. His book "Legal Tender: Love and Legitimacy in the East German Cultural Imagination" came out in 2010 with Cornell University Press. He is currently working on a project called "Playing House," which looks at tropes of domesticity in East and West German New Wave film.
Terri Zhu received
her Ph.D. in June 2009 and is currently pursuing a Master's Degree in
Public Policy at the Harris School of Public Policy at the University
of Chicago.