DEPARTMENT OF GERMAN

Professor Ryder is the German Study Abroad advisor and advisor of the Minor in Business German. Previous positions included Director of the Basic Language Program in the Germanic studies department at UIC (2014-2017), postdoctoral Research Fellow at the International Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture (GCSC), and Visiting Professor at the University of Chicago. He completed his PhD in German and Comparative Literary Studies at Northwestern University in 2009.
 
His monograph, The Acoustical Unconscious: from Walter Benjamin to Alexander Kluge (DeGruyter, 2022), explores the psychological, media-historical and theoretical implications of the acoustical unconscious, which he extrapolates from Walter Benjamin’s “optical unconscious” and remarks on language. More recently, Professor Ryder has published an article in the Alexander Kluge-Jahrbuch and has a forthcoming article on measure in the work of Benjamin and Sam Weber. He has also presented at conferences on Kafka, Kluge, and early radio drama theory. He is currently co-editing the book, The Companion to German Radio Drama. 

Despite his robust research agenda, Professor Ryder also teaches full time. While most of his classes are in business German and the first-year German sequence, he designed and now regularly teaches the popular class, “Cultural History of Beer and Brewing in Germany and Chicago.” He also teaches a first-year seminar on “The Human and Machine,” and has in the past taught classes on both the graphic novel and the German radio play.

Finally, over the last five years Professor Ryder has spearheaded the German Summer Internship Program, which typically sends 4-6 NU students to Germany for 3-month summer internships. Students in any field are eligible to apply to this program, but we prioritize those who have previously gone on the "Berlin: German City, Global Perspectives" Summer Program and/or are taking German language courses at NU.