Kevin S. Amidon is Associate Professor of German Studies in the Department of World Languages and Cultures at the Iowa State University, where he serves also as a contributing member of the faculty in History of Technology and Science. He has published on eugenics, race theory, feminist evolutionary thought, the early Frankfurt School, American railroads and agricultural research, Brecht and Weill, Kafka, and Krenek. His current research project focuses on the cultures of the German life sciences in the early twentieth century.
Between Quantity and Quality: High Schools and the Iowa State University German Program
Stephen Brockmann is Professor of German at Carnegie Mellon University and the former managing editor (from 2002-2007) of the Brecht Yearbook. He is also the Vice President of the German Studies Association and the author of Literature and German Reunification (1999), German Literary Culture at the Zero Hour (2004), and, most recently, Nuremberg: The Imaginary Capital (2006).
Friederike Eigler received her Ph.D. from Washington University in St. Louis, and is Professor of German and Chair of the German Department at Georgetown University. She has published widely on 20th and 21st century German literature and culture was editor of The German Quarterly (2004-06). Eigler’s last book explores the role of memory and history in multi-generational novels since the unification of Germany (“Gedächtnis und Geschichte in Generationenromanen seit der Wende,” Erich Schmidt Verlag, 2005). Her current research focuses on changing notions of Heimat and belonging –- and related concepts of space and temporality.
Homepage: www1.georgetown.edu/departments/german/faculty/eigler/
Response to the MLA Foreign Language Report 2007
Lisabeth Hock received her Ph.D. from Washington University in St. Louis in 1998. She taught for three years at the College of Wooster in Ohio and is currently Associate Professor of German at Wayne State University in Detroit, where she received the President’s Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2008 and the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences Teaching Award in 2007. She has published a monograph on Bettina von Arnim, articles on nineteenth-century women writers the discourse of melancholy (the topic of her current book project), and an article on the articulation of information literacy goals across the German curriculum. Her homepage: http://www.langlab.wayne.edu/lhock/index.html
Response to the MLA Foreign Language Report 2007
Monika Hohbein-Deegen received her Staatsexamen from the Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena in Germanistik, Anglistik und Auslandsgermanistik in 1993 and her Ph.D. from the University of Cincinnati in 2003. She is currently Associate Professor of German and International Studies at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh where she serves as the coordinator for the German Program within the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures and as the German faculty liaison for the Cooperative Academic Partnership Program. Her research and teaching interests include contemporary German and East German history, culture, and literature, questions of German and East German identity, travel writing, Business German and teaching study abroad courses. She is the author of Reisen zum Ich: Ostdeutsche Identitätssuche in Texten der neunziger Jahre (P. Lang, 2010). Her current research focuses on women’s travel writings about the New World, documentary and fictional literature on the Stasi, as well as representations of identity in contemporary literature.
Teaching East German History within an Interdisciplinary Study Abroad Program
Gabi Kathöfer is Assistant Professor of German Studies at the University of Denver. She received her B.A. and M.A. from the Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster, Germany, and her Ph.D. from the University of Connecticut. Her research interests include: Nineteenth-Century German Culture and Literature; Travel Literature; (Trans-)Cultural Studies; Postcolonial Studies; Second Language Pedagogy. She is author of Auszug in die Heimat: Zum Märchen als Alteritäts(t)raum (Georg Olms Verlag 2008). Recent articles focus on politics of identity in German immigrant communities in Brazil. Her homepage: https://portfolio.du.edu/pc/port?portfolio=gkathoef
Response to the MLA Foreign Language Report 2007
Charlotte Melin is Chair of the Department of German, Scandinavian and Dutch (University of Minnesota) and its past Director of Language Instruction. A member of AAUSC (American Association of University Supervisors and Coordinators), she currently serves on the MLA Committee on the Teaching of Languages. Recent publications include Poetic Maneuvers: Hans Magnus Enzensberger and the Lyric Genre (Evanston: Northwestern UP, 2003); “Facing Long-term Realities: Policies Regarding Adjuncts in Foreign Language Departments” ADFL Bulletin 36.3 (2005): 22-27; “Back to the Drawing Board?—Articulation and Outreach Revisited,” Die Unterrichtspraxis/Teaching of German 38.2 (2005): 182-89; and “The Language Program Director in Curricular and Departmental Reform: A Response to the MLA Ad Hoc Report,” co-author with Glenn S. Levine, Corrine Crane, Monika Chavez, and Thomas A. Lovik, Profession 2008 (MLA): 240-54. Website: http://gsd.umn.edu/article.php?id=180&offset=0
Response to the MLA Foreign Language Report 2007
Notes from the Field: Toward a Model for Saving German Studies
Karen Remmler is Professor of German Studies, Critical Social Thought and Gender Studies at Mount Holyoke College where she has taught since 1990. She is the former co-director of the Weissman Center for Leadership and the Liberal Arts at Mount Holyoke college. Her current research focuses on the politics of memory in contemporary German and Japanese cultures and on proper burial as represented in literature, film, and memorial sites. Remmler is the author of Waking the Dead: Correspondences between Walter Benjamin’s Concept of Remembrance and Ingeborg Bachmann’s “Way’s of Dying” and the coeditor, with Sander Gilman, of Reemerging Jewish Culture in Germany: Life and Literature since 1989. In 2002, she also coedited, with Leslie Morris, the anthology, Contemporary Jewish Writing in Germany. With Christopher Benfey, Remmler is the co-editor of Artists, Intellectuals, and World War II: The Pontigny Encounters at Mount Holyoke College, 1942-1944 (2006). Remmler recently completed essays on cultures of memory and the late German writer, W.G. Sebald.
Response to the MLA Foreign Language Report 2007
Virginia (Ginny) Steinhagen received her Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota in 1996. She is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of German, Scandinavian and Dutch at the University of Minnesota where she has taught since 1998. She has been coordinator of the College in the Schools German Program since 2001. She is a co-coordinator of the second-year German program, and a co-author of the University of Minnesota’s second year curriculum “Sprünge.” She is a past president of the Minnesota Chapter of the American Association of Teachers of German, and a past Netzwerk Trainer for the Goethe Institute in Chicago.
College in the Schools: Connecting the University of Minnesota and High Schools
Kris T. Vander Lugt is Assistant Professor of German Studies in the Department of World Languages and Cultures at the Iowa State University. She studied German and Culture Studies at Indiana University’s Department of Germanic Studies, completing her Ph.D. in 2006 with a dissertation entitled “Return of the Living Dead: Reading the Revenant Body in Post-68 German-Language Literary and Visual Culture.” Her current research focuses on postwar German horror film.
Between Quantity and Quality: High Schools and the Iowa State University German Program
Astrid Weigert is Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of German at Georgetown University. Her research interests include issues of gender and genre in 18th and 19th century literature, especially in Romanticism. Additional interests focus on curriculum design, second-language acquisition for the advanced learner, and business culture courses.
Heiko Wiggers is a German native who received his Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin in 2006. He has been at Wake Forest University as a Senior Lecturer in German since 2005 and teaches Business German, Language Classes, and Linguistics. His fields of research are Business German, Low German, Sociolinguistics, and German Dialectology.