Job Placements

Franz Kafka's employment application to the insurance company Assicurazioni Generali (1907). Courtesy of Assicurazioni Generali Historical Archive.

Emily Dreyfus received her Ph.D. in Summer, 2020. She is currently a Post-Doc and Humanities Teaching Fellow at the University of Chicago.

Tamara Kamatovic received her Ph.D. in Spring, 2020 and is working as a journalist in Vienna.

Daniel Carranza received his Ph.D. in Spring, 2020. He has accepted a tenure-track position in Germanic Studies at Harvard University.

Ethan Blass received his Ph.D. in Winter, 2020. Upon graduating, he spent a semester teaching at Colorado State University. He is now a Lecturer of German at the University of Oklahoma.

Mirjam Berg received her Ph.D. in Autumn, 2019. She is currently a wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin at the Language Learning Center at the TH Köln (University of Applied Sciences Cologne) and program coordinator of the DAAD-project Integra (Integration von Geflüchteten ins Fachstudium).

Jessica Resvick received her Ph.D. in Spring, 2019. She is currently an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of German Studies at Dartmouth College.

Alexander Sorenson received his Ph.D. in Spring, 2019. He accepted a position as Visiting Associate Lecturer at Wheaton College for the 2019-2020 academic year. Alex will be a Humanities Teaching Fellow at the University of Chicago in Fall 2020 and then join the Center for the Humanities and Society at the University of California at Santa Barbara as a Postdoctoral Fellow.

Maeve Hooper received her Ph.D. in Winter, 2018. She is currently a Lecturer of German and the Coordinator of the First-year and Intensive German Language Sequences at the University of Chicago.

Georginna Hinnebusch received her Ph.D. in Autumn, 2018. She currently teaches at the Sorbonne and several other academic institutions  in Paris.

Amy Stebbins received her Ph.D. in Autumn, 2018 in Germanic Studies and Cinema and Media studies. She is a Director, Librettist, and Scholar with numerous projects and scholarly publications on the topics of theater, opera, performance, and race.

Matthew Jake Fraser received his Ph.D. from the Department of Germanic Studies in July of 2018. In 2016-2017 he was a fellow in the Berlin Program for Advanced German and European Studies. He is now Assistant Professor of German and Humanities at Reed College in Portland, Oregon.

Robert C. Abbott Jr. received his joint Ph.D. from the Department of Germanic Studies and the John U. Nef Committee on Social Thought in 2015. He has been on the faculty at St. John’s College, Annapolis since the fall of 2013.

Martin Baeumel received his Ph.D. in May 2013 and is currently an Assistant Professor of German Studies at Wesleyan University. He was previously a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Germanic Studies at the University of Texas in Austin. His dissertation explores changes in the aesthetic, social, and epistemological function of poetry between 1680 and 1750. Other interests include historical semantics, narrative theory, and German literature of the seventeenth through early nineteenth centuries in general. He has published an article on Alexander von Humboldt’s travel writing, as well as translations of essays by Jurek Becker.

Hunter Bivens is an Assistant Professor of Literature at the University of California at Santa Cruz. He has recently published articles on Anna Seghers and Brigitte Reimann and is working on a project examining the aesthetics of social class, history, and the built environment in the former GDR.

Chris Brummer received his Ph.D. in 2001. He subsequently earned his J.D. at Columbia Law School in 2004 and was a Assistant Professor of Law at Vanderbilt University where he taught international business transactions and capital markets. He has since has been appointed full Professor at Georgetown University School of Law.

Hannah Vandegrift Eldridge defended her dissertation "Anxiety and Acknowledgment: Lyric Poetry and the Truth of Skepticism" in April 2012. Since August 2012, she has been Assistant Professor of German at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her interests include late 18th through 20th-century literature, culture, and philosophy, in particular lyric poetry, music, and the relationship between sound and text. Her book, Lyric Orientations: Hölderlin, Rilke, and the Poetics of Community, was published in Cornell University Press's Signale series in 2016.

Peter Erickson defended his dissertation "Religious Conversion in the Late German Enlightenment: Goethe, Schiller, Wieland" in August 2014.  After graduating, he served for two years as a visiting assistant professor at Oakland University (2014-2016) and is now an Assistant Professor of German at Colorado State University.

Andrew Erwin received his Ph.D. in June 2011 and held faculty appointments at Bowdoin College and Cornell University. After several years working at the Institute for the International Education of Students (IES Abroad),  Andrew accepted a position at Adelphi University as Director of the "Pathway Program" for international students and as adjunct faculty member in General Education.

Veronika Fuechtner, Associate Professor of German at Dartmouth College, studied German literature, media, history and political science at the Philipps-University in Marburg and the Free University in Berlin. She received her M.A. from Washington University in St. Louis and her Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. Before coming to Dartmouth in the fall of 2002, she taught at John Carroll University in Cleveland. She has published articles on Herbert Marcuse, Alfred Döblin, Magnus Hirschfeld and on the state of German Studies in the US. Her book Berlin Psychoanalytic, about culture and psychoanalysis in Weimar Republic Germany and in exile, was published by the University of California Press in 2011. She is currently at work on another monograph about racial discourses before fascism and how they still impact ideas on race and immigration in contemporary Germany (The Racial Unconscious in 20th-Century German Culture). Other research and teaching interests include theories of multiculturalism, gender studies, drama, and film. She has received research grants from the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Psychoanalytic Association, the Deutsche Schillergesellschaft, the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Social Sciences Research Council, and she has served on the national steering committee of Women in German. 

Mila Ganeva (Ph.D. 2000) is Associate Professor of German at Miami University of Ohio. She is affiliated also with the Jewish Studies and Film Studies programs. Her research and teaching interests include mass media, fashion, film history, the Holocaust, and contemporary German film. She is author of the book Women in Weimar Fashion: Discourses and Displays in German Culture, 1918-1933 (Camden House, 2008) and of numerous published essays on fashion journalism, fashion photography, and literature and culture of the 1920s, early German film comedies, and Berlin in film. For her article “Weimar Film as Fashion Show: Konfektionskomödien or Fashion Farces from Lubitsch to the End of the Silent Era,” published in German Studies Review (May 2007), she was awarded the Best Article Prize of the German Studies Association and German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD). 

Katja Garloff (Ph.D. 1997) is Professor of German and Humanities at Reed College in Portland, Oregon. She is the author of Words from Abroad: Trauma and Displacement in Postwar German Jewish Writers (Wayne State University Press, 2005) and Mixed Feelings: Tropes of Love in German Jewish Culture (Cornell University Press, 2016). She has also published many articles on authors such as G. E. Lessing, Franz Kafka, Robert Walser, Joseph Roth, Peter Weiss, Paul Celan, Theodor Adorno, Hannah Arendt, W.G. Sebald, Barbara Honigmann, and Benjamin Stein. She is currently co-editing (together with Agnes Mueller) a book on contemporary German Jewish literature. In recent years, Garloff has been a visiting professor at Harvard University, the recipient of a research fellowship from the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, and a member of the program committee of the German Studies Association Conference. She currently serves on the editorial board of Nexus: Essays in German Jewish Studies and on the division executive committee of the Modern Language Association Committee of America.

Anna-Katharina Gisbertz (Ph.D. 2008) is Assistant Professor of German Literature at the University of Mannheim in Germany. She teaches courses on literature and culture of the 18th to the 21st century. Her research interests include aesthetic theory, philosophy, Vienna around 1900, poetologies of mood, and constructions of the future in narratives. She is the author of Stimmung – Leib – Sprache: Eine Konfiguration in der Wiener Moderne (2009), as well as the editor of Stimmung: Zur Wiederkehr einer ästhetischen Kategorie (2011). She has written articles about Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Theodor Fontane, Karl Marx, and others, and she is also a board member of the Hugo von Hofmannsthal-Gesellschaft. In 2010, she held a guest lectureship at the University of Sarajevo. She is now Privatdozentn in Mannheim and held a Visiting Professorship in Vienna.

David R. Greeves (Ph.D. 2012) received his doctorate after completing a dissertation on "Patterns of Poetic Absorption in German Lyric Poetry in the Age of Herder (1750-1784)." He has been appointed Adjunct Instructor of German at the James Madison University starting in August 2014.

Stephen Haswell Todd received his PhD in 2015. His dissertation, "The Turn to the Self: A History of Autism, 1910-1944," was the first comprehensive study of the psychiatric, philosophical, and aesthetic discourse of autism prior to its modern usage. Beginning in the fall of 2016 he will be a postdoctoral fellow at the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College.

Matthew Heintzelman received his Ph.D. in 2000. His is curator of the Austria/Germany Study Center and Cataloguer of Rare Books at the Bush Center at St. John’s University in Collegeville, Minnesota.

Hillary Hope Herzog (Ph.D. 2001) is Associate Professor of German Studies at the University of Kentucky. Her book, "Vienna is Different:" Jewish Writers in Austria from the Fin de Siecle to the Present, appeared with Berghahn Books in 2011. She is currently co-editor of the Journal of Austrian Studies. 

Todd Herzog (Ph.D. 2001) is Associate Professor of German and Head of the Department of German Studies at the University of Cincinnati. He is co-editor (along with Sander Gilman) of A New Germany in a New Europe (Routledge, 2001) and the volume Jewish Identity and Jewish Writing in Germany and Austria Today (along with Hillary Hope Herzog and Benjamin Lapp). He has written articles on the image of America in recent German-Jewish literature, theories of biological and cultural hybridity, the role of film in criminal investigation and the modernist case history. His book entitled Crime Stories: Criminal and Society in Weimar Germany was published in 2007. He is currently co-editor of the Journal of Austrian Studies. In 2012, he was inducted into the Academy of Fellows for Teaching and Learning. 

Joela M. Jacobs (Ph.D. 2014) is currently Assistant Professor of German at the University of Arizona, after being the first to hold a postdoctoral position as Humanities Teaching Scholar at the University of Chicago.

John M. Jeep earned his PhD in 1990 under the direction of Professors Jaffe and Northcott. He is Professor of German Studies at Miami University. His research includes medieval German rhetoric, Old and Middle High German, women's studies, legal rhetoric, and especially alliterating word-pairs in the early stages of German. He edited Medieval Germany: An Encyclopedia (2001). Jeep has directed the German Studies Program, the Linguistics Program, and was Associate Director of Liberal Education. Jeep served a three-year term as President of the National German Honorary (in higher education) Delta Phi Alpha. He is also a Distinguished Field Bibliographer for the Modern Language Association International Bibliography, where he indexes work in German literature, Medieval German, German linguistics, Linguistics, etc. He has directed Miami University's Intensive German Summer Program fifteen times since 1993. He also co-chairs Miami's University Summer Reading Program.

Marcus Lampert received his Ph.D. in December 2015. He was a Humanities Teaching Scholar at the Chicago Center for Teaching 2015-17 and then relocated to Berlin, Germany, where he is employed by the firm Price-Waterhouse.

Joel Lande received his Ph.D. in October 2010. After being a Cone-Haarlow-Cotsen Fellow in the Society of Fellows at Princeton University, he joined the German Department at Princeton as Assistant Professor in 2014.

After completing her dissertation "The Aesthetics of Sacrifice" in December 2008, Kym Lanzetta taught courses on vampire literature, Germanic epics and fairy tales, Berlin in the 20th century, and Vergangenheitsbewältigung at various Chicago institutions including the Newberry Library and the University of Illinois at Chicago. She currently lives in Portland, Oregon and works as a translator and researcher.

Katharina Loew received her joint Ph.D. in Cinema and Media Studies and Germanic Studies in 2011. Her dissertation was concerned with the impact of special effect technologies on German film during the silent era. She is currently Assistant Professor of German and Cinema Studies, Associate Director of Cinema Studies, College of Liberal Arts at the University of Massachusetts, Boston.

Anthony Mahler (Ph.D. 2014) is currently a wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter in the Deutsches Seminar of the Universität Tübingen.

Malika Maskarinec (Ph.D. 2012) was a Postdoctoral Fellow at eikones, University of Basel, Switzerland, and is now Assistenzprofessorin für Neuere deutsche Literatur at Universität Bern.

James McCormick completed his Ph.D. in 2014 and is currently the Program Coordinator for the University of Chicago's Summer Language Institute.

Robert Neiser received his Ph.D. in May 2015. He is currently working for the Austrian national accreditation agency in higher education in Vienna.

Amanda Norton received her Ph.D. in December 2010. She was Strategist/Planner in the Office of the Dean of the Biological Sciences and the Pritzker Medical School at the University of Chicago. She is now working at the Lab School as Associate Director of Annual Giving.

Cecilia Novero received her Ph.D. in 2000. After teaching at the University of Michigan, Vassar College and the Pennsylvania State University (UP), she has now joined the Department of Languages and Cultures at the University of Otago. She completed a book (The Antidiets of the Avant-Garde) on the temporal relations between the historical Avant-garde and the Neo-Avant-Garde (University of Minnesota Press, 2010). Cecilia's research and teaching interests encompass aesthetics, the Frankfurt School, European cinema, Travel literature, the former GDR, especially women writers and, most recently, "animal studies". She has published numerous articles on Viennese Actionism, the Swiss artist Daniel Spoerri, the Dada movement, the cultural history of food, and film. Her new book project focuses on the crossings between work, travel and film in contemporary Europe. 

Ashley Passmore currently teaches at Texas A&M University.

Anke Pinkert received her Ph.D. in 2000 with a dissertation on Literary Intellectuals and the East German State. She is Associate Professor of German and Cinema Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. During the 2001-2002 academic year, she was a Gilles Whiting postdoctoral fellow at the University of Chicago. Her book Film and Memory in East Germany was published by the Indiana University Press in 2008. She has published articles in journals on East German literature, postwar and post-Holocaust representations, postcolonial discourse, as well as gender, trauma, and postwar film. Her current book project New Vision: Postcommunist Travel and Displacement focuses on notions of global ethical responsibility in transcultural post-1989 narratives. She is also an active faculty member of the Education Justice Project at the University of Illinois. Based on her teaching experience, she is currently conducting a research study on Holocaust education in prison. She is interested in developing alternative pedagogies and research agendas that cultivate an integration of scholarship and experience, research and teaching, reflection and service. 

Elisa Primavera-Lévy (Ph.D. 2009)  is currently an editor of Sinn und Form. Between 2009 and 2013, she was a research fellow at the IFK (Internationales Forschungszentrum Kulturwissenschaften) in Vienna and a postdoctoral scholar at the University of Constance. She is the author of Die Bewahrer der Schmerzen. Figurationen körperlichen Leids in der deutschen Literatur und Kultur (Kadmos, 2013) and has published articles on photography, Nietzsche, and others. Elisa was involved as moderator in a project on "climate fiction," shown here: www.lcb.de/digitalessay/european-climate-fiction. 

Leigh Ann Smith-Gary (Ph.D. 2012) is pursuing a Master's Degree in Social Work at the University of Chicago's School of Social Service Administration (SSA).

Michael Sosulski received his Ph.D. in 1999. He has recently been named provost at Wofford College, effective July 1, 2016. Prior to this appointment, Michael was an Associate Professor of German at Kalamozoo College in Michigan, where he chaired the Department of German Studies. His book Theater and Nation in Eighteenth-Century Germany appeared with Ashgate Press in April 2007. He continues to work on the idea of German nationhood as a performed identity further into the 19th and 20th centuries, in theater, youth organizations (precursors to the Hitler Youth), and in film.

Catherine Sprecher (Ph.D 2008) is a Visiting Assistant Professor of German at Lewis and Clark College in Portland, Oregon. Catherine defended her dissertation "The Ecstasy of Influence: Life Writing in the Works of Bettine von Arnim and Mary Shelley" in April 2008. In this study, she shows how Bettine von Arnim and Mary Shelley write the lives of Goethe and Percy Shelley respectively by creating a new mode of life-writing. She describes this new mode of writing as an ecstatic embrace of different voices: Arnim and Shelley give a voice to the dead even as they open a space in which they can articulate their own subjectivity.  

John Urang (Ph.D. 2005) is an Assistant Professor of Media and Film Studies at Marylhurst University.  His book Legal Tender: Love and Legitimacy in the East German Cultural Imagination came out in 2010 with Cornell University Press. He is currently working on a project called Playing House, which looks at tropes of domesticity in East and West German New Wave film.  

Andrea Wald received her Ph.D. in December 2015. Her dissertation explored the role of ornament as an epistemic form between art and science at the turn of the last century. In April 2016, she began work in research funding and management at FWF (Austrian Science Fund) where she is responsible for the funding of arts-based research (PEEK).

Mimmi Woisnitza (Ph.D. 2015) is currently a wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin at the Institut für Philosophie und Kunstwissenschaft at the Leuphana University Lüneburg.

Terri Zhu received her Ph.D. from the department in June 2009 and completed a Master's of Public Policy at the University of Chicago's Harris School in June 2011. She is currently working on a community development and policy research initiative (www.louisgroceries.org) in a "food desert" on Chicago's South Side.