DEPARTMENT OF GERMAN

Professor DeSocio is thrilled to be joining the German faculty at Northwestern! Before coming to Northwestern, he completed his PhD in German Studies at the University of Michigan in 2021 and taught as a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of German Studies at Vassar College.

During graduate education, he won two teaching awards from the University of Michigan, including its highest honor for graduate student instructors. While at Vassar, he was awarded funding to establish a year-long, interdepartmental working group and foster collaboration around language pedagogy as well as to pioneer the use of virtual reality in teaching intermediate German in a project entitled “Mapping Queer Berlin.” Drawing on these experiences and his years-long work at Michigan’s Center for Research on Learning and Teaching as a teaching consultant, his research interests include language-learning technologies, incorporating skills of humanistic inquiry into language courses, and diversifying what and how we teach in the German classroom through queer and feminist approaches. He has published articles and book chapters on topics such as teaching German queerly, undergraduate research in the language classroom, the temporal politics of the New Woman in the novels of Marieluise Fleißer, queer temporality in German modernist prose, and on queer German book culture more broadly.

He enjoys spending much of his free time with his miniature dachshund Helen, pursuing a passion for 1970s gay American literature, playing video games, and exploring the Midwest’s nightlife as an avid disco and house music dancer.