Graduate: Alumni Profiles

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

• Hector Feliciano (PhD 2023)

  Dissertation:  Soteriologische Travestie. Eine Lektüre der Grenzen propositionalen Denkens anhand Hofmannsthals Der Schwierige

  Current Position: An agile master at Geopost, in a role dedicated to implementing the concept of "humanocracy" within its organization and leadership.

• Sorrel Dunn (PhD 2023)

  Dissertation:  Natures of Color: The Literary Environments of Adalbert Stifter and Paul Scheerbart" (recipient of the 2023 CLS Dissertation Prize)

• Theodore LaPorte (PhD 2023)

  Dissertation:  Education for All and None: Nietzsche, Benjamin, and the Problem of Learning.

• Wiebke Bullermann (PhD 2021)
  

  Dissertation:  Die Auswirkungen von Migration, Flucht und Asyl auf Heimat und Identität in der deutsch-arabischen Migrationsliteratur 
  Current Position: Project manager and strategist for Peta Germany in Berlin

•  Jan Cao (PhD 2021)
  

  Dissertation: Transplanting Languages: Botanical Poetics of Paul Celan and Yoko Tawada
  Current Position: Junior Research Fellow at the Si-Mian Institute for Advanced Studies in Humanities and assistant professor in the Department of Chinese Language and Literature at East China Normal University in Shanghai

• Jonas Rosenbruck (PhD 2020)
  

  Dissertation: The Smell of Language: Messianism and Olfactory Poetics in Modernity
  Current Position:  Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow Comparative Literary Studies, Northwestern University

• Sandra Berjan (PhD 2019)

  Dissertation: The Neuro-Poetics of Pain: Human Physiology in Haller and Lessing
  
  

• Sonia Li (PhD 2018)
  

  Dissertation: Secretaries of the Negligible: Reading Animals in Kafka and Coetzee
  Current Position: Associate Product Manager, Mentor Collective

• Frederike Tevebring (PhD 2017)
  

  Dissertation: Unveiling Baubo: The Making of an Ancient Myth
  Current Position: Lecturer in Liberal Arts, King’s College London
  
  

• Clemens Ackermann (PhD 2017)
  

  Dissertation: Writing as a Continuation of War by other Means: Ernst Jünger in Weimar Germany
  Current Position: Managing Director of the RKW Baden-Württemberg GmbH, Stuttgart, Germany

• Henrik S. Wilberg (2016)
  

  Dissertation: Language before Critique: Figures of Aesthetics from Leibniz to Herder
  Current Position: Assistant Professor, University of Minnesota-Morris

• Benjamin Robinson (PhD 2016)

  Dissertation: Bureaucratic Fanatics in the Work of Kleist, Melville, Conrad, and Kafka
  Current Position: Universitätsassistent (Postdoc), University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria
  
  

• Saein Park (PhD 2015)
  

  Dissertation: Genealogies of Lumpen: Waste, Humans, and Lives from Heine to Benjamin
  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.

• Ena Jung (PhD 2013)
  

  Dissertation: Punctuation and Mimesis in Heinrich von Kleist, Edgar Allan Poe, Emily Dickinson, Thomas Bernhard, and Konrad Bayer

• Steven Tester (PhD 2013)
  

  Dissertation: Georg Christoph Lichtenberg: Reflections on Knowledge Nature and the Self
  Also: PhD, Philosophy, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (2014)
  Dissertation: Kant's Metaphysics of Mind and Rational Psychology
  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
  Current Position: Reader in Critical Theory, Goldsmiths, University of London

• Daniel Nolan (PhD 2010)
  

  Dissertation: Exhibiting Candor: Public Exposure in the Works of Heinrich von Kleist and Evgenii Baratynskii
  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
  Current Position: Visiting Instructor, Marquette University

• Rob Ryder (PhD 2009)

  Dissertation: Hearing Otherwise: The Acoustical Unconscious from Walter Benjamin to Alexander Kluge
  Current Position: Assistant Professor of Instruction, Northwestern University

• Amy Zumfelde (Phd 2009)
  

  Dissertation: Surviving Survival: Trauma, Testimony and Text in Slavery and Holocaust Fictional Narratives.
  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
  Current Position: Literary scholar, freelance translator and editor

• Paul North (PhD 2007)
  

  Dissertation: A Drawback of Thought: The Concept of Distraction in Benjamin, Heidegger, Kafka
  Current Position: Professor of Germanic Languages & Literatures, Yale University

• Christopher Reid (PhD 2006)
  

  Dissertation: Invested identities: The economics of self-development in the "Bildungsroman "
  Current Position:  Founder/CEO LanguagePilot GmbH (January 2018)

• Anthony Adler (PhD 2005)
  

  Dissertation: The Rule of Nature: Dance, Physiocracy, and Poetic Language in Hölderlin's Hyperion
  Current Position: Professor of German and Comparative Literature, Yonsei University's Underwood International College, Seoul, Korea

• Martin Klebes (PhD 2003)
  

  Dissertation: Remembering Failure: Philosophy and the Form of the Novel
  Current Position: Associate Professor, University of Oregon

• Colin Benert (PhD 2002)
  

  Dissertation: Coming to Terms with Music: Music, Memory, Language, and the Crucible of Interiority in Germany in the 1790’
  Current Position: Lecturer in Germanic Studies, University of Chicago

• Catherine Grimm (PhD 1998)
  

  Dissertation: Der Mensch -- Metapher: Temporality, Identity, and the Concept of Language in the Works of Friedrich von Hardenberg (Novalis)
  Current Position: Lecturer in German, Miami University

• Richard Block (PhD 1998)
  

  Dissertation: The Spell of Italy: The Goethe Effect and the German Literary Imagination.
  Current Position: Associate Professor of Germanics, University of Washington