DEPARTMENT OF GERMAN

Graduate: Alumni Profiles

Congratulations to all of our Graduate students who have finished their PhD and have successful careers in academia and elsewhere.

• Sandra Berjan (PhD 2019)
  Dissertation: The Neuro-Poetics of Pain: Human Physiology in Haller and Lessing
  Director: Peter Fenves
• Joanthan Agins (PhD 2019)
  Dissertation: Im Gefilz von Kräften: The Language of Force in Robert Musil's Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften
  Director: Peter Fenves
• Sonia Li (PhD 2018)
  Dissertation: Secretaries of the Negligible: Reading Animals in Kafka and Coetzee
  Director: Anna Parkinson
  Current Position: Associate Product Manager, Mentor Collective
• Frederike Tevebring (PhD 2017)
  Dissertation: Unveiling Baubo: The Making of an Ancient Myth
  Director(s): Peter Fenves and Marianne Hopman (co-chairs) Ann Gunter (committee member)
  Current Position: France Yates postdoctoral Fellow at the Warburg Institute in London
  Initial Position: Visiting Assistant Professor of Instruction, Northwestern University
• Clemens Ackermann (PhD 2017)
  Dissertation: Writing as a Continuation of War by other Means: Ernst Jünger in Weimar Germany
  Director: Jörg Kreienbrock
  Current Position: Forschungskoordination Internationalisierung at ARENA2036, Stuttgart, Baden-Württemberg, Germany (clemensackermann@outlook.com)
• Henrik S. Wilberg (2016)
  Dissertation: Language before Critique: Figures of Aesthetics from Leibniz to Herder
  Director: Sam Weber
  Current Position: Assistant Professor, University of Minnesota-Morris
• Benjamin Robinson (PhD 2016)
  Dissertation: Bureaucratic Fanatics in the Work of Kleist, Melville, Conrad, and Kafka
  Director: Peter Fenves
  Current Position: Universitätsassistent (Postdoc), University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria
  Initial Position: ICI-Berlin
• Saein Park (PhD 2015)
  Dissertation: Genealogies of Lumpen: Waste, Humans, and Lives from Heine to Benjamin
  Director: Peter Fenves
  Current Position: Visiting Assistant Professor, University of California, Santa Cruz
• Christian Pinawin (PhD 2014)
  Dissertation: The poetics of function. On the concept of literature in the writings of Robert Musil.
  Dissertation Committee: Peter Fenves, Samuel Weber, Jörg Kreienbrock
• Ena Jung (PhD 2013)
  Dissertation: Punctuation and Mimesis in Heinrich von Kleist, Edgar Allan Poe, Emily Dickinson, Thomas Bernhard, and Konrad Bayer
  Dissertation Committee: Peter Fenves, Samuel Weber, Jörg Kreienbrock, Betsy Erkkila
• Steven Tester (PhD 2013)
  Dissertation: Georg Christoph Lichtenberg: Reflections on Knowledge Nature and the Self
  Director(s): Peter Fenves and Rachel Zuckert
  Also: PhD, Philosophy, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (2014)
  Dissertation: Kant's Metaphysics of Mind and Rational Psychology
  Director(s): Rolf-Peter Horstmann and Rachel Zuckert
  Current Position: Adjunct Lecturer, Georg-August-Universität Göttingen, Philosophisches Seminar
• Julia Chi Yan Ng (PhD 2012)
  Dissertation: Conditions of Impossibility: Failure and Fictions of Perpetual Peace
  Directors: Peter Fenves and Sam Weber
  Current Position: Lecturer (tenured assistant professor), English and Comparative Literature, Goldsmiths, University College London
  Initial Position: Harvard
• Daniel Nolan (PhD 2010)
  Dissertation: Exhibiting Candor: Public Exposure in the Works of Heinrich von Kleist and Evgenii Baratynskii
  Director: Peter Fenves
  Current Position: Assistant Professor of German Studies, University of Minnesota Duluth
• Koch Michael (PhD 2009)
  Dissertation: Here and Now: The Immanence of Rilke's Angel
  Dissertation Committee: Rainer Rumold, Sam Weber, Volker Dürr
  Current Position: Visiting Instructor, Marquette University
• Rob Ryder (PhD 2009)
  Dissertation: Hearing Otherwise: The Acoustical Unconscious from Walter Benjamin to Alexander Kluge
  Director: Sam Weber
  Current Position: Visiting Assistant Professor of Instruction, Northwestern University
  Initial Position: Justus-Liebig-University in Giessen, Germany)
• Amy Zumfelde (Phd 2009)
  Dissertation: Surviving Survival: Trauma, Testimony and Text in Slavery and Holocaust Fictional Narratives.
  Director: Julia Stern
  Current Position: Professor of Modern Languages, Oakton Community College
• Anna Glazova (PhD 2008)
  Dissertation: Counter-Quotation: The defiance of poetic tradition in Paul Celan and Osip Mandelstam
  Dissertation Committee: Peter Fenves, Rainer Rumold, Sam Weber, Werner Hamacher
  Current Position: Literary scholar, freelance translator and editor
  Previous positions: Cornell, Johns Hopkins, Rutgers
• Paul North (PhD 2007)
  Dissertation: A Drawback of Thought: The Concept of Distraction in Benjamin, Heidegger, Kafka
  Director: Peter Fenves
  Current Position: Professor of Germanic Languages & Literatures, Yale University
  Initial Position: NYU
• Christopher Reid (PhD 2006)
  Dissertation: Invested identities: The economics of self-development in the "Bildungsroman "
  Director: Volker Dürr
  Current Position:  Founder/CEO LanguagePilot GmbH (January 2018)
  Initial position:  Purdue University; Center for European Studies (CES); Harvard, Freelancer academic translator, 2011 to 2017
• Anthony Adler (PhD 2005)
  Dissertation: The Rule of Nature: Dance, Physiocracy, and Poetic Language in Hölderlin's Hyperion
  Director: Peter Fenves
  Current Position: Professor of German and Comparative Literature, Yonsei University's Underwood International College, Seoul, Korea
  Other positions: University of Colorado at Boulder, Loyola University
• Martin Klebes (PhD 2003)
  Dissertation: Remembering Failure: Philosophy and the Form of the Novel
  Director:  Helmut Müller-Sievers
  Current Position: Associate Professor, University of Oregon
  Initial positions: Kenyon College and University of New Mexico
• Colin Benert (PhD 2002)
  Dissertation: Coming to Terms with Music: Music, Memory, Language, and the Crucible of Interiority in Germany in the 1790’
  Dissertation Committee members: Samuel Weber, Helmut Müller-Sievers, Peter Fenves
  Current Position: Lecturer in Germanic Studies, University of Chicago
  Initial Position: Yale
• Catherine Grimm (PhD 1998)
  Dissertation: Der Mensch -- Metapher: Temporality, Identity, and the Concept of Language in the Works of Friedrich von Hardenberg (Novalis)
  Directors: Géza von Molnár and Peter Fenves
  Current Position: Lecturer in German, Miami University
  Initial Position: Notre Dame
• Richard Block (PhD 1998)
  Dissertation: The Spell of Italy: The Goethe Effect and the German Literary Imagination.
  Director: Géza von Molnár
  Current Position: Associate Professor of Germanics, University of Washington
  Initial Position: University of Colorado