Graduate Students
 Kevin Boyd kjb4f@virginia.edu | A native of Georgia, Kevin Boyd joined the German Department at UVA in 2005. Kevin is a graduate of the College of Charleston in South Carolina, where he earned a BA in History and German Studies. At the University of Georgia Kevin completed an M.A. in German Studies with a thesis on the philosophy and poetics of Hermann Broch. His main interests are German and European literature of the 18th and 19th centuries, Cervantes, and Austrian studies. Kevin is currently working on his dissertation, "Translation, Language and Parody: Goethe's Translation Theory and Application." |
 Kevin Boix kjb6tm@virginia.edu |
Kevin graduated from the College of the Holy Cross with a degree in German and Economics. He joined the German Department at UVA in Fall 2012. His research interests include psychoanalysis, fin-de-siècle Vienna, film, and critical theory. |
 Gabriel Cooper gsc8r@virginia.edu | Gabriel Cooper received an A.B. with highest honors in German from Oberlin College in 2004. He accepted a Fulbright Teaching Assistantship in Berlin for the following year and taught English at a Gesamtschule. In November 2006, he passed his M.A. exams at UVA. He participated in an exchange program in 2008-09 at the Universität Mannheim, where he developed and co-taught a Hauptseminar entitled "Heines Goethebild," and led a discussion section for an introductory course in literary studies. His interests include late 19th and early 20th century literature, German Jewish literature and thought, and Yiddish literature. He is currently writing his dissertation, Fantasies of Jewish Power: Religion and State in German Jewish Writing from Mendelssohn to Schoenberg. When he is not reading fiction or thinking German, he enjoys playing the violin and listening to music. He performs klezmer and gypsy repertoire regularly with the UVA Klezmer Ensemble and the Olivarez Trio. |
 Selma Erdogdu se5z@virginia.edu | Selma studied American Studies, comparative literature, and English at Bochum University, Germany. After graduating with an MA majoring in American Studies in 2001, Selma joined the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at the University of South Carolina, from which she received her MA in German Studies in 2005. Selma has been a graduate student at the UVa German Department since the fall of 2005. In May 2007, she passed her PhD qualifying exams. Currently, she is participating in an exchange with the American Studies Department of Dortmund University, Germany, where she works on her dissertation, and teaches an undergraduate class on cross-cultural literature. In her dissertation, Selma explores the role of travel as a metaphor in cross-cultural contemporary German and US-American literature. Selma's research interests include: 18th Century German literature, Lessing, Fin de Siècle, America in the German imagination, WWII in German film, German Orientalism, postcolonial theory, German identity formation, and contemporary cross-cultural literature. |
 Dylan Goldblatt ndg4f@virginia.edu | Dylan Goldblatt first became interested in German as a Congress-Bundestag Youth Exchange Scholar in 2002-03. After studying at Helmholtz Gymnasium Hilden for one year, he took up studies at the College of William and Mary as a Monroe Scholar. In 2007 he received a B.A. in German Studies and Linguistics. Dylan also spent a Junior Year abroad in Berlin where he studied Deutsche Philologie at the Freie Universität in Berlin. As a graduate student at the University of Virginia, Dylan received his M.A. in 2009 with a thesis entitled "Die Hochzeit des Mönchs: Recovering the Art of the Oral Story." He passed his Qualifying Exams in the categories of Lyric Poetry, Staufische Klassik, and Freud in Spring 2010. Currently, Dylan is a Ph.D. Candidate preparing his dissertation on Law and Power in Gottfried's Tristan. He will serve as a visiting scholar at the University of Massachusetts Amherst this year. Some of his research interests include urbanity and homelessness, film and rap lyric. |
 Danielle Verena Kollig dk3q@virginia.edu | Verena received her Magister Artium from the University of Mannheim, Germany, in 2006, in Germanic Languages and Literatures, philosophy, and sociology. For the academic year 2006/2007, she joined the German Department at the University of Virginia as a visiting exchange student and became a full-time Ph.D. candidate and teaching assistant with the beginning of the fall semester 2007. Her dissertation carries the work title ‘Man, Material, Human Being (?) – The Body in Nietzsche’s Philosophy and Its Influences on (Trans-) Gender Acts in Theater and Film.’ Her major research interests are in gender and transgender studies, media studies and histories, and semiotic approaches to contemporary cultures and literatures. She has presented papers on performance and film on conferences like the 13th Symposium of the International Brecht Society ‘Brecht in / and Asia’ in Honolulu (May 2010) and at the Eight International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities in Los Angeles (June/July 2010). Recently, she has moderated and participated in the panel ‘The Dark Side of Love - Terror and Sex’ (area chair Karen Ritzenhoff, Central Connecticut State University), at the ‘2010 Film & History – Representations of Love in Film and Television’ conference (Milwaukee, November 11-14) |
 Irina Kuznetsova ik4m@virginia.edu | Irina Kuznetsova first studied English and Linguistics at Moscow State Pedagogical University, from which she attained an MA with Distinction in Linguistics and Intercultural Communication in 2000. In 2003 she received her second MA in German from California State University, Long Beach. In 2005, after two years of teaching German and Russian at different institutions in London, UK and in the US, Irina joined the German Department at the University of Virginia to pursue her Ph.D. Her primary research interests include German literature and culture of the nineteenth and early twentieth century, gender and language theories, comparative German-Russian studies of literature, theatre and film. During her graduate studies Irina developed and taught a literature seminar on Ingeborg Bachmann and a discussion session for an introductory course in literary studies at Mannheim University in Germany, and a seminar, entitled Dostoevsky and German Modernism at the University of Virginia. In 2010-2011, Irina was in Berlin as a recipient of the DAAD dissertation research grant. Her dissertation explores the concept of the demonic in Russian and German literature in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Recently Irina won the AATG-German Quarterly Graduate Student Paper Award for the best research paper by a graduate student in German Studies. The title of her paper is "The Possessed: The Demonic and Demonized East and West in Thomas Mann’s Der Zauberberg and Dostoevsky's Demons," and it will be published in German Quarterly in 2012. |
 Xiaoxi Liu xl3gv@virginia.edu | Xiaoxi graduated from Wuhan University in China. She joined the German department at UVA in Fall 2010. |
 Matthew Lockaby mrl2m@virginia.edu | Matt graduated with a bachelors in German from Vanderbilt University. |
 Solvejg Nitzke sen5f@virginia.edu | |
 Stefanie Parker snp2j@virginia.edu | Stefanie Parker is a native of Germany and moved to the United States in 2003 after receiving her 'Magister' in German as a foreign language (DaF) and American studies from the University of Leipzig in Saxony. She moved to Charlottesville and began graduate studies in August of 2006. From 2003 to 2006 she taught German language courses at Roanoke College, Sweet Briar College and Hampden Sydney College. During the summer she has enjoyed being a part of the Summer Language Institute at UVa and Virginia Governor's School at VCU. While her academic interests are broad, she would like to focus on post-war literature, in particular on female authors like Christa Wolf and Elfriede Jelinek. She enjoys reading, watching movies, traveling and spending time with her husband Tommy. |
 Danielle Pisechko dnp4hp@virginia.edu | Danielle Pisechko graduated magna cum laude from the University of Delaware in 2009 with a degree in Foreign Languages and Literatures: German, Latin, and Russian and a minor in Linguistics. She continued at the University of Delaware to obtain a Master's degree in German Language and Literature in 2011. She joined the University of Virginia in fall 2011. Her current research interests are varied and wide-spread, but include authors such as Kleist, Kafka and Schnitzler as well as Drama and Media Studies. |
 Gerrit Roessler gkr5f@virginia.edu www.gerritroessler.com | Gerrit passed his PhD qualifying exams in October 2010 and is currently working on his dissertation on science fiction radio play. In the spring of 2010 he received the Graduate Certificate in Comparative Literature for which he compared concepts of myth, fiction and reality in Star Trek and Raumpatrouille Orion. Gerrit first came to UVa as a Graduate Exchange from the University of Dortmund, Germany in 2005/06. He was Max Kade German House Director and taught several courses as TA. After completing his "Erstes Staatsexamen for Upper and Lower Secondary Education" from the University of Dortmund in Music and English, he returned to Virginia as a full time student in German. He received his Masters in the fall of 2008. A chapter for the anthology The Politics of Post-9/11 Music: Sound, Trauma, and the Music Industry in the Time of Terror was published at Ashgate in October 2011 and an article on Battlestar Galactica and the horror of relativism will appear in December at the Buechner Verlag in Darmstadt. Currently he is teaching part-time at the Department of European Languages at Queens College, CUNY. He is also working at the German Academic International Network (GAIN) at the DAAD office in New York City, where he is living with his partner Allison and his hedgehog Ludwig. |
 Kathryn Schroeder kns3bt@virginia.edu | Kathryn Schroeder started this fall with the graduate program in German Languages and Literatures. She received her bachelors degree in 2007 from Guilford college in Greensboro, NC in English Language and Literature and German Studies. After graduation, she spent two years in Austria as a Fulbright teaching assistant and two years studying at the university of Vienna, before coming to UVA. |
 Rebekah Slodounik ras9rb@virginia.edu | Rebekah Slodounik graduated magna cum laude from Washington University in St. Louis in 2009 and started attending UVA the following fall. In November 2010 she passed her Master's exam. In spring 2011 she completed her Master's thesis, entitled "The Aesthetics of Else Lasker-Schüler and Her Relationship to Bildung." In summer 2011 Rebekah studied in Berlin at the Leo Baeck Summer University in Jewish Studies. Rebekah will take her PhD. qualifying exams in Spring 2012 in twentieth century German Jewish literature, narrative theory, and Heinrich Heine. Her other research interests include memory studies, Yiddish literature, and autobiography. |
Jessica Sniezyk js3as@virginia.edu | |
 Kerstin Steitz ks8fa@virginia.edu | Originally from Berlin where she studied Comparative Literature, North American Studies and Journalism at the Freie Universtität, Kerstin joined the UVa German Department in the Fall of 2006. Before moving to Charlottesville, she studied as an Erasmus exchange student at the University of Bath in 2003/04 and taught German as a Fulbright Teaching Assistant at Idaho State University in 2005/06. She passed her M.A. exam in the fall of 2007 and her PhD qualifying exams in the fall of 2009. Her main research interests include 20th century German literature, German-Jewish literature, the intersections of law and literature, psychoanalysis and Gender Studies. Kerstin spent the academic year 2010/2011 as a guest lecturer in the American Studies Department at TU Dortmund, where she taught two undergraduate courses "Affact: The Literary and Filmic Treatment of Holocaust Trial Records" and "Freud and his (American) Readers." During her time in Dortmund, she initiated and organized a literature project on the subway called "Gedankenzüge: Dialog zwischen Kulturen." In the fall semester 2011, she became a Jewish Studies Fellow and taught an undergraduate course "The Holocaust in Law, Literature and Film." Currently, Kerstin is writing her dissertation entitled "Beyond Closure: The Artistic Re-Opening of Holocaust Trial Spectacles." |
 Geraldine Suter gps3a@virginia.edu | Geraldine, a native of Germany, after studying at Philipps-Universität in Marburg, graduated from Bridgewater College in 2006 and from James Madison University in 2008. She has taught Freshman Composition and German for four years at James Madison University, and has just begun her graduate work at UVa. |
 Charles Taggart cwt5z@virginia.edu | Charles entered the German Department at UVA in the fall of 2008. He graduated with first-class standing from McGill University in Montréal, where he studied German Literature along with European History and received the German Department's graduation prize. In the fall of 2009, he passed his M.A. exam and will be doing his comprehensive examson Kafka, the novel and German Arthurian Romance in the Spring of 2012 . As an undergraduate, Charles spent a year at the University of Tübingen, and last year he participated in a teaching exchange with the University of Mannheim. While there, he offered two Proseminare: the first on German travel novels and the second on modern apocalyptic literature. |
Berend Ter Borg bt3bx@virginia.edu | |
Raphaela Tkotzyk rt2nx@virginia.edu | |
 Beatrice Waegner bw2jz@virginia.edu | Beatrice studied Germanic Languages and Literatures, Political Science, and English and American Language and Literature at the University of Mannheim in Germany. She complemented her studies with practical experience by directing drama projects, training conflict mediators, volunteering with youth work, and writing journalistically. After working as a teacher and boarding house tutor at Marlborough College in the UK, she completed her “Erstes Staatsexamen for Higher Secondary Education” with honors in 2009. Her final thesis on acoustic and nutritional diseases in the work of Franz Kafka wasawarded the artes liberales research prize in humanities. Beatrice was a research fellow at the Chair for German Medieval Languages and Literatures at the University of Mannheim and taught a lecture course on Diachronic German Linguistics before joining the German Department’s academic community first on an exchange, and since the Fall Semester 2011, as a Ph.D. student. Beatrice continues to enjoy studying Kafka but is also particularly interested in Baroque poetry, the German Realists Auerbach and Stifter, the discourses of materialism and economics, German Jewish literature, and contemporary literature in general. |
 Ulrike Wilson ukw9f@virginia.edu | Ulrike is a native German from Koblenz am Rhein, but has lived in this country for 25 years. She has graduate degrees from Germany, Canada as well as the United States. She received a Masters Degree in English and Canadian literature from York University, Toronto; completed the Erste and Zweite Staatsexamen in English and Physical Education at the Johannes Gutenberg Universität in Mainz and at the Mainzer Studienseminar; and she is ABD in American Literature and Rhetoric from Ohio State University. Ulrike taught for nine years at Odessa College, Texas. There, she was a tenured Associate Professor and taught courses, such as American and World literature, composition, introduction to literature, and remedial writing. Ulrike joined the German department at UVA in the fall of 2000 and received her Masters Degree in the summer of 2002. Her fields of interest are narrative literature, Expressionism, drama and post-WWII German literature (both East and West German). She passed her dissertation comps in September 2004 and since then has been working on her dissertation, which she hopes to complete within a year. In her research, she is focusing on writers from the former East Germany, such as Reinhard Jirgl, Kerstin Hensel, Angela Krauss, and Ingo Schulze. The topic of her dissertation is: “New Stories and New Storytelling from the neue Bundesländer: Diversity and Experimentation in the Works of Angela Krauss and Kerstin Hensel.” To acquire more teaching experience and to pursue her passion for teaching, Ulrike has been teaching at various institutions near her hometown Hampden-Sydney—Longwood College, Hampden-Sydney College and also at UVA. When she needs a break from teaching and dissertating, Ulrike spends time with her family. She is a regular at the gym, loves her garden, and occasionally escapes to the mountains to hike and to do volunteer trail work. |
 Adam Winck amw9t@virginia.edu | Adam Winck graduated from Wake Forest University in 2004 with a degree in German and philosophy, having completed a senior thesis on the notion of truth at work in Nietzsche's philosophy. As an undergraduate, he studied for a year at the Freie Universität in Berlin. In 2006, he completed a Master of Arts and Religion degree from Yale University, spending the second of this two-year program at Albert-Ludwigs Universität in Freiburg. In the fall of 2007, he completed his M.A. in German literature at UVA and is continuing on to the Ph.D. program. His interests are broad enough to include literature, philosophy, and theology, and it's possible he will focus on the 18th and 19th centuries. In his time away from studies, Adam can be found racing a bicycle at the collegiate and elite amateur levels. |