Graduate Students
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.
Laura Bohn grew up in Romania, Illinois, Colorado, and, mostly, Vienna, Austria. After her Austrian Matura she attended Princeton University and graduated with a B.A. in Comparative Literature in 2003. As an exchange student, Laura also attended the universities of Freiburg, Heidelberg, and Tübingen. Her interests currently focus on the interrelation between German and Eastern European culture and literature, Hapsburg colonialism and its literary implications, as well as foreignness in German literature, past and present.
Manuel Clemens studied Cultural Studies and Philosophy in Frankfurt (Oder) and Paris. He graduated in 2005 with a diploma thesis on Adorno's notion of experience. Before joining Yale he spent a year as a Visiting Research Student in the German Department at Stanford University. His main interest lies in the history and theory of "Bildungshumanismus" and its interaction with "Kulturkritik" and the historical avant-garde at the beginning of the 20th century. Other topics include architecture, aesthetics, marxism, Musil, Carl Einstein and Foucault.
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.
Alicia E. Ellis is completing a dissertation on the drama of Kleist and Grillparzer and is currently a visiting assistant professor of 20th century literatures at Hampshire College. She holds undergraduate degrees in Women's and Gender Studies and German Literature from Amherst College (1998) and a master's degree in African-American Studies from Yale University (2004). Alicia has also studied at the Universities of Goettingen, Konstanz, and Heidelberg. She has taught in the Department of Women's and Gender Studies and been a Five College Fellow in German Literature at Amherst College.
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, filmmaking and sculpture.
She began her Ph.D. at Yale in 2004 in the interdisciplinary program of Film Theory and German Studies.
She began her Ph.D. at Yale in 2004 in the interdisciplinary program of Film Theory and German Studies.
Jason Groves comes from Carlsbad (California not Bohemia). He has studied at UCSD (San DIego), the Georg-August Unviersity (Göttingen), Johns Hopkins (Baltimore) and currently is a Ph.D. candidate at Yale. He holds a B.A. from UCSD in English Literature and German Studies, and an M.A. from Johns Hopkins in German Studies. He has published articles on Artaud, Beckett, and Freud, and has a forthcoming chapter in an Atlas to be published by Fordham University Press under the aegis of The Institute on Critical Climate Change. Translations include a documentary film on the Schattenparker in Freiburg and a map for An Architektur published in the Atlas of Radical Cartography. Currently he is working on a dissertation on the problem of the ground in German literature.
Melissa Ingersoll began graduate work at Yale in 2002. She has studied at the universities of Rochester, Connecticut, Vienna, Potsdam, Freiburg, and Konstanz. Her dissertation concerns itself with the construction of gender in the periodicals of Sophie von La Roche, Johann Georg Jacobi, and Christoph Martin Wieland. 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.
Hans Jochen Lind, ph.d. candidate, entered the Graduate Programme in 2005 after one year at Yale 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 (USA), holding a Law Degree from the University of Tübingen, a BA/MA-equivalent (Magister Artium) in Literature, Art, Film and Philosophy from the University of Konstanz, and a professional degree in Law (Assessor Iuris). Appointed Attorney-at-Law in 2003 by the German Barrister Association.
His interests lie in the Early 18th till Early 20th Century Literature and Philosophy (with main focus on the German Enlightenment), Literature and Media Theory (Semiotics, Aesthetics, Reader-Response-Criticism, and in general Questions of Representation) as well as in interdisciplinary approaches on Literature, Theatre, Film and Philosophy – in short the field of Media Studies from a broader perspective. His legal interests comprise the Conflict of Laws as well as Legal Theory and Legal Hermeneutics. His dissertation deals with the spatial mechanics of cognition in 18ct Epistemology.
Past projects include assistance in translating an annotating Immanuel Kant’s “Lectures on Anthropology”, ed. by Allen Wood, Cambridge University Press (forthcoming). And of course there is film…
His interests lie in the Early 18th till Early 20th Century Literature and Philosophy (with main focus on the German Enlightenment), Literature and Media Theory (Semiotics, Aesthetics, Reader-Response-Criticism, and in general Questions of Representation) as well as in interdisciplinary approaches on Literature, Theatre, Film and Philosophy – in short the field of Media Studies from a broader perspective. His legal interests comprise the Conflict of Laws as well as Legal Theory and Legal Hermeneutics. His dissertation deals with the spatial mechanics of cognition in 18ct Epistemology.
Past projects include assistance in translating an annotating Immanuel Kant’s “Lectures on Anthropology”, ed. by Allen Wood, Cambridge University Press (forthcoming). And of course there is film…
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.
Ansgar Mohnkern entered the PhD program in German Literature in 2005. He 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 early 19th century literature and aesthetics. He is working on a dissertation on Goethe's Repetitions, including readings of both scientific and literary writings.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Jan Claas van Treeck received a B.A. in Theatre Studies as well as an M.A. in German Literature from Ruhr-Universität Bochum before pursuing a career in international marketing.
After six years as an independent project manager he felt the "call" of academia again to work on his long-abandoned dissertation on Walter Serner.
His interests center around aestheticism and the avantgardes from 1870 to 1930 and what emerged from the ashes of 90s German Pop literature as well as multimedia-art.
After six years as an independent project manager he felt the "call" of academia again to work on his long-abandoned dissertation on Walter Serner.
His interests center around aestheticism and the avantgardes from 1870 to 1930 and what emerged from the ashes of 90s German Pop literature as well as multimedia-art.
