Graduate Students
(Graduate students who have not submitted a photo or blurb are not represented here.)

	Martin Blumenthal-Barby studied German Literature, Philosophy, and Theory of Drama in Berlin (Free University), Ithaca (Cornell) and New Haven (Yale), where he currently pursues a Ph.D. His dissertation revolves around questions of sovereignty in the works of Benjamin, Arendt, Kafka, Heiner Müller, and the New German Cinema.
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	Evan Matthew Cobb entered the graduate program in German in 2001 after earning a BA in German Literature and History at Oberlin College and studying at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich. His work in the late 19th- and the 20th century focuses on adolescence and sexuality, aesthetics and trauma, and conscription and gender. Favorite writers include Thomas Mann, Klaus Mann, Wedekind, Schnitzler, George, Jelinek, and Ransmayr. He is also interested in the fields of queer studies, fantastic, utopian and science fiction literatures, and the subliterary genres of mass media. He is an active member of and organizer for GESO, and as a former competitive swimmer, is always trying to coax himself back into the water.
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	Alicia E. Ellis graduated from Amherst College in 1998 with a double major in German and WAGS and then worked for two years as a 3rd grade bilingual Spanish teacher for the Teach for American Program. Under the direction of Professor Emeritus, Cyrus Hamlin, Alicia is writing a dissertation on the challenge of character in the historical dramas of Schiller, Kleist and Grillparzer. Her teaching and research interests are in German and Austrian drama of the long 19th century, genre studies (the novella and short story, poetry, the novel) and non fiction forms of writing (autobiography/memoir/journal/essay/pamphlet). Other interests include the intersections of history and literature and philosophy and drama, state power and the body, aesthetics, Jewish writing from the 19th century to the present and the growth of reading, writing and literacy in the what we now know as Germany. Alicia also earned an M.A. in African American Studies while at Yale. Her primary preoccupations in that field lie in African American & Anglophone Caribbean poetry and prose, Black European Studies, modernity and race, transnational literatures, and gender and sexuality. Queer theory, magical realism, science fiction, American & British Literatures from the 18th -21st century and Classical Drama & Theater are additional research areas. Alicia is currently a Five College Fellow at Amherst College for the 2006-2007 academic year.
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	Nora I. Gortcheva holds a BA in Architecture and German Studies from Mount Holyoke College and the Hochschule für Bildende Künste in Hamburg. After completing her undergraduate studies in 2003 she returned to Hamburg to join a seminar with Wim Wenders on the cinematic representation of dreams. Her major topic of research is the city of modernity in film, specifically German film from 1920s and 1930s. Her other interests are in the field of photography, film- making and sculpture. She began her Ph.D. at Yale in 2004 in the interdisciplinary program of Film Theory and German Studies.
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	Jason Groves completed his undergraduate education at UCSD, where he majored in English Literature, German Studies, and completed an area of focus in Environmental Studies. He holds an M.A. from the Johns Hopkins University in German Studies and is currently pursuing his Ph.D. at Yale. His current critical interests include thinking upside down, writing under the influence (of Artaud and others), the Berliner Volksbühne, trilobites, considerations of presentability, and personal narrative. In addition to his academic work he has performed in Simparch’s “Free Basin” at the Documenta XI, directed Operation: Waiting (an adaptation of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot) and currently is working on an adaptation of Akira Kurosawa’s first color film, Dodesukaden, for the theater.
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	Melissa Ingersoll began graduate work at Yale in 2002. She holds a Bachelor's degree in Modern Languages and Cultures from the University of Rochester and a Master's degree in German Literature from the University of Connecticut, and has also studied at the Universities of Vienna, Potsdam, Freiburg, and Konstanz. Her dissertation concerns itself with the construction of gender in German periodicals of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Other interests nebulize around the history of reading and publishing, nineteenth-century women writers, decadence and the Fin-de-Siècle, GDR literature, film studies, travel literature and the politics of location, and alienation and modernism. She is currently doing dissertation work in Freiburg, Germany, on a Fulbright grant.
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	Eike Kronshage studied Comparative Literature and Philosophy in Munich (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München), Copenhagen (Københavns Universitet), Berlin (Freie Universität Berlin) and New Haven (Yale University). He received his M.A. in 2007 with a thesis on "Sexual Violence in J.M.Coetzee's Disgrace". His research so far focussed on J.M.Coetzee's writings, the 19th century French and English literature, as well as on narratology and hermeneutics. Among other things he has worked as a Danish translator for Langenscheidt KG, Microsoft and other companies. Currently he is pursuing his research towards his PhD.
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	Kristina Mendocino entered the German Department at Yale in 2006, after studying English and American Literature at Dartmouth College, and Dramaturgy and Dramatic Criticism at the Yale School of Drama. The community of words within German poetry – Celan, Rilke, Büchner, Hölderlin – and the thinking that poetry makes possible, are where her interests lie.
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	Hans Jochen Lind entered the Graduate Programm at Yale in 2005 after having been at Yale for one year as a Fulbright/Baden-Wuerttemberg Scholar. He studied Law, Literature, Philosophy, Art and Film at the Universities of Tübingen and Konstanz (Germany), Copenhagen (Denmark), Fribourg (Switzerland) and Yale, holding a Bachelor degree in Law from the University of Tübingen, a BA-equivalent in Literature, Art, Film and Philosophy from the University of Konstanz and a professional degree as articled clerk from the Ministry of Justice. In 2003 he was appointed Attorney-at-Law by the German Bar Association after two years of legal clerking as assistant and chief judge assistant at the Konstanz District Court Civil Chamber of Appeal and the Penal Court. His interests lie in the Late 18th till Early 20th century Literature, the Prague Literature, Literature History and Theory, Semiotics, Hermeneutics, Aesthetics and Reader-Response-Criticism, as well as in interdisciplinary approaches on Literature, Theatre, Film, Philosophy and other rival arts. His legal interests comprise the Conflict of Laws, Intellectual Property Law and Legal Hermeneutics. And sometimes, he tries to make movies….
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	Ansgar Mohnkern entered the PhD program in German Literature in 2005. He has studied German Literature, German Language and Philosophy at the University of Bonn (Germany) where he received his M.A. in 2004. His work focusses on German literature and philosophy from the 18th century to present, with a particular interest in 19th century literature and aesthetics. He is working on writers such as Kant, Schelling, Friedrich Schlegel, Hölderlin, Kleist, Büchner, Heine, and Marx. Other main topics include Critical Theory (Benjamin, Adorno) and problems of literary representation of sovereignty, concepts of theatricality, and ideas of modernity.
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	Lucas Murrey is writing a dissertation – Atem, Hauch, Gewitter (breath, mortality) – on Heidegger, Hölderlin, and ancient Greek thinking and poetry. Karsten Harries is the adviser; the committee includes Carol Jacobs, Henry Sussman, and, from UCLA, John McCumber.
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	Evelyn Preuss grew up in the legendary land that has been pronounced dead so many times (recently, in the almost Oscar-prized Goodbye, Lenin) that one may well wonder whether it is still alive. Behind the Iron Curtain, she worked as assistant stage director; once it came down, she took up German and Philosophy, edited a newspaper, when new, less visible barriers went back up, and, all along, has enjoyed teaching. Her interests are very broad, reaching from the mores of medieval society to the cultures of former colonies to recent developments in German culture. Her dissertation examines the politics of aesthetics and media as they come to bear in East German Cinema. She co-organizes, together with Peggy Piesche, the triennial "East Germany Revisited" conference and is a member of the "Screening Identities" Networking Project of the British Academy. She has published on Baroque drama, the intersection of politics, architecture and film aesthetics in recent documentary cinema and on ambiguity in the films of Konrad Wolf. Her article on the theatrics of the Cold War (and beyond), "'You Will Never Know': The Semantics of the Wall," is forthcoming in Perspecta 36: The Yale Architectural Journal.
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	A Seattle native, Bryn Savage studied English and German literature at the Universität Hamburg and Smith College, writing an honors thesis on corporeal metaphor in 17th-century English love poetry. During the 2004/05 academic year, she received a DAAD Fellowship to pursue the same topic in German Baroque love poetry. Bryn is also interested in the influence of scientific and theological discourses on poetry and the role of the poet in relation to the state at different points in German history. Of all the many resources at Yale, Bryn finds the availability of Early Modern texts in the Beineke most exhilarating.
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	Oliver Schowalter-Hay was born and raised in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He received an AB from the University of Chicago before coming to Yale in 2000. He spent the academic year 2002/3 at the Universität Konstanz, and in 2004 was coörganizer of the German Department's conference on W.G. Sebald. He is currently at work on a dissertation, advised by Cyrus Hamlin, that addresses performativity in the Kunstballaden of Goethe and Brecht. He can be reached by email here and sometimes maintains a homepage here.
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	Qinna Shen did her undergraduate studies at Beijing Foreign Studies University and Heidelberg University. She received her Masters Degree in German from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2002. The same year she joined the German department at Yale. Her research interests include 20th century German literature and culture, East German literature, Women’s studies, German films, Holocaust literature and film. She is now working with Prof. Katie Trumpener on her dissertation titled “From Jacob Grimm to GDR Witches: Feminist Witchcraft in East German Hexenliteratur.” The premise for the dissertation is the observation of a cluster of literary works coming out of the former East Germany that share the common denominator of enlisting the service of the witch to monitor, evaluate and critique the GDR society from gendered perspectives. The first chapter traces the historical precedents for positive appropriation of the witch as in Jacob Grimm’s Deutsche Mythologie (1835) and in Jules Michelet’s La Sorcière (1862), and surveys the contemporary scenes of reclaiming the witch by the witch-identifying second-wave feminists in the United States and Western Europe. The second chapter offers original analysis of the GDR witch novels. The third chapter analyzes a few examples from post-Romantic up to post-Wende, sometimes non-feminist, representations of the witch in German literature and film. Important theoretical frameworks for her reading are Western feminist theories, magical realism/post-modernism, socialist feminism and romanticism.
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	Anna Souchuk stems originally from Chicago. She came to Yale in 2002 after studying at the Universität Wien and receiving her BA in German and Art History from the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana. Her dissertation will concern itself with the Internet, the Viennese coffeehouse as a cultural institution, and the Austrian writers Karl Kraus and Elfriede Jelinek. Non-academic interests include running, hiking, traveling, and painting.
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	Gabriela Stoicea was born and raised in Romania, where she now tries to spend as much of her summers as possible. Before coming to Yale University in the Fall of 2005, she earned an M.A. in Translation and Interpretation Studies from the University of Bucharest (2002), a post-graduate certificate in Translation Studies from the University of Warwick (2003), and an M.A. in German from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (2005). Her research so far focused on the intersection of politics and aesthetics in German literature of the early 20th century, and aimed to deliver gender-based re-evaluations of German cinema. From her previous studies Gabriela also retains an active interest in Germany’s cultural and intellectual history, specifically its contribution to the conceptualization of translationality understood both as an adequate theoretical framework for discussing the processes characteristic of the transition between various communicative media and, in more recent times, as an integral part of the translational/transnational exchange.
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	Brangwen Stone was born in Iowa and spent her childhood in Canberra, Basel, Cambridge and Melbourne. She received a Bachelor of Arts and a Bachelor of Laws from The University of Melbourne in 2003. During the course of her lengthy undergraduate studies she spent a semester at Humboldt Universität in Berlin. Her honours thesis is entitled ‘Riskante Freiheit’: Identitätssuche in zwei Wenderomanen von Monika Maron und Angela Krauss'. She commenced her graduate studies at Yale in 2004. Her main areas of interest are GDR literature, Wendeliteratur, 20th century literature and contemporary literature.