DEPARTMENT OF GERMAN

Martina Kerlova, coordinator of second-year German and Director of Undergraduate Studies (DUS) for the Slavic department, has been a member of the German and Slavic Departments since 2002. Before coming to Northwestern she earned Master’s Degrees in German Studies from Charles University in Prague and in German language and Literature from Masaryk University in Brno, Czech Republic. Her theses were on “Schriftsteller des Grazer ‘Forum Stadtpark’ und Wolfgang Bauer im realen Umfeld der Gesellschaft” and on “The Politics of the Sudeten German Party in Interwar Czechoslovakia.” She has earned fellowships from DAAD, ÖAD, the Robert Bosch Stiftung and the Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung, and has studied in Vienna, Konstanz, Düsseldorf, Graz, and Leipzig.

Kerlova’s course offerings have included first, second and third-year German and Czech, as well as “Prague: City of Cultures, City of Conflict,” “Czech New Wave Film: Cinema with a Human Face,” and “Germans and Slavs.” In 2015 the Association for Student Government named her to the ASG Faculty Honor Roll. Kerlova received a grant from the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities to participate in the 2016-2017 Digital Humanities Summer Faculty Workshop and two Hewlett grants to support the development of video-based teaching materials. She translated into Czech Remaining Relevant after Communism: The Role of the Writer in Eastern Europe, by Andrew Wachtel. In her previous lives Martina taught German in Prague and Vienna and administered the European Union’s “Leonardo” retraining program for the Czech Republic. In her free time she likes to read literature, attend theater performances, backpack in National Parks and cross-country ski.