Bill Berentsen has a bachelor's degree from Dartmouth College (study abroad in Freiburg, Germany), and M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from the Ohio State University (dissertation work based at the Ökonomische Universität Wien). He has taught at the University of Georgia (1976-1986) and UConn (since 1986), and has been a visiting professor at several European universities, including Humboldt Uni. (Berlin, 1978 and 1995), Uni. Vechta (1985), and the Ökonomische Uni. (1982). His research and writing focuses on regional socioeconomic and land use change in the USA and Europe-Germany in particular. Bill's current and recent writing has included journal articles on migration and regional socioeconomic inequalities in Germany, work on World Book encyclopedia articles on Germany and Europe, and articles in preparation on issues related to regional development in the USA and Connecticut. He teaches courses in Geography on issues related to U.S. regional development, as well as an occasional offering of an introduction to Europe. His personal ties to things German include enjoying travel in Germany, related both to learning and to visiting many colleagues, friends and relatives-two grandparents came to the USA from Germany in the early 20th century.

Anke Finger received her B.A. equivalent from the University of Konstanz in Germany, where she studied German and American Literature and European History. After an exchange year at Wellesley College in 1989/90, she continued to explore her interests in comparative literature at Brandeis University where she received her M.A. in 1995 and graduated with a Ph.D. in 1997. Before coming to UConn in 2001, she held an assistant professorship in German Studies at Texas A&M University.

Prof. Finger's teaching and research focus on modernism, literature and other arts, contemporary aesthetics, media studies, interculturality, and everyday life theories and practices. The author of a monograph on the total artwork and modernism, Das Gesamtkunstwerk der Moderne (Vandenhoeck&Ruprecht, 2006), she edited (with Danielle Follett) a collection of articles entitled The Aesthetics of the Total Artwork: On Borders and Fragments (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011). Her continuing work on the total artwork includes the discussion of atmospheres as part of an exploration of new phenomenology. This academic year, she was invited to connect the total artwork with Henry van de Velde's ideas, for the 12th Bauhaus-Kolloquium in Weimar. Next, the total artwork will feature in a book project on (inter)sensory perception and the avant-gardes. 

A co-founder (with Rainer Guldin, Università della Svizzera Italiana, Lugano) of Flusser Studies, Anke Finger's related scholarship in media studies centers on the writings of Czech-Brazilian philosopher Vilém Flusser and his interdisciplinary work (including intermedia, aesthetics and perception). The expanded English edition of an introduction to Vilém Flusser, edited and co-authored by Finger, was published in May 2011 by the University of Minnesota Press; it is also available in Portuguese and German. Her next Flusser project will examine the philosopher's multifaceted understanding of creativity. In 2013, she is organizing an international symposium on "Remediating Flusser: From Print-Text to the Image-Flood," a Digital Humanities project.

Flusser also inspired Anke Finger's work on intercultural communication. Other research projects include a collection of essays entitled KulturConfusão: German-Brazilian Interculturalities, co-edited with Gabi Kathoefer and Christopher Larkosh (in preparation for De Gruyter). Outlined as a hybrid project (scholarship/memoir/mixed materials), she is writing a monograph on memory, her family history, everyday life, and the arts in the former German Democratic Republic (East Germany). She blogs at lcldigitalmedia (with Roger Travis) and at interartresearch (with Christiane Heibach) and serves on the editorial boards of Evental Aesthetics and CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture, among other journals. 

Oliver Hiob is an Assistant Professor in Residence of German Studies and Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies in the Department of Literatures, Cultures and Languages at the University of Connecticut. He received his PhD last May from the University of Connecticut and was a recipient of the highly competitive “Humanities Institute Tenth Anniversary Graduate Fellowship”. In his dissertation, "Guilt is Always Beyond Doubt: Punishment and Poetic Justice in the Works of German-Jewish Writers in the Early 20th Century," Hiob investigates manifestations of punishment in literary works prior to 1934. He explores the conceptualization and representation of punishment in works by Franz Kafka, Alfred Döblin, Gertrud Kolmar, and Joseph Roth and pay’s special attention to the intersection of literature and law, philosophy, and theology. While Hiob is particularly interested in issues related to punishment and guilt, other research and teaching interests include European fairy tales, war literature, Jewish and Christian religious issues in 20th-century literature, as well as film studies.

Specializations in 19th and 20th Century German History.

Glenn Stanley is a music historian specializing in the music of the classic and romantic periods in Germany-speaking Europe. He has published extensively in American, British, and German journals and books with special emphasis on Beethoven, and nineteenth-century choral music. He also writes on questions of aesthetics, methodology, and music criticism, and contributed three articles to the revised New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians in these areas. He edited volumes 3 and 7 of Beethoven Forum, a scholarly yearbook, and also edited the Cambridge Companion to Beethoven. He is the book-review editor for 19 th-century Music, and a member of the editorial boards of Beethoven Forum and the Journal of the American Musicological Society. He writes program notes for Carnegie Hall on a regular basis. Current projects include the chapter on Parsifal for the Cambridge Companion to Wagner, and essays on Beethoven's orchestration techniques and the reception of Fidelio for the Beethoven-Handbuch, which will be published by the Laaber-Verlag in Germany .

Katharina von Hammerstein received her Ph.D. in German Literature at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and holds a degree in Math, German, and Education from the University of Goettingen, Germany. Her area of scholarly expertise is German-language literature and culture of the late eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Her publications focus on German Romanticism (including extensive work on Sophie Mereau-Brentano); autobiographical writings/self-(re)presentations as political practice in nineteenth-century public discourses; the ways women have inscribed themselves into literary, social and political discourses in the nineteenth century; representations of female happiness from the enlightenment to the turn of the century; colonial constructions of Self and Other as represented in the ways Black men and women have been represented in German, Austrian, and Namibian literature, ethnology, and visual arts around 1900; and human rights and humanitarianism in German-language literature. She has also published in the area of teaching German and interdisciplinary curriculum development, i.e., on approaches to linking language learning to the learning in other disciplines, such as history, art history, political science, geography, film, etc. Her scholarly background comes to bear in her graduate courses on German Romanticism, Self-Writings and Writing Yourself, colonial and postcolonial German-African Connections, Gender and Literature, Love in Literature, the 1848 Revolution, and various other topics of eighteenth through twentieth-century literature and culture. Since von Hammerstein is also very interested in film, she includes film and other artistic representations (e.g., UConn's extensive and precious Kaethe Kollwitz collection) whenever appropriate. Her research projects regularly take her to Germany, Austria and Namibia and she has presented papers at national and international conferences ranging from all over the U.S., Canada and Germany to Russia, England, Spain, Italy, France, South Africa, and Namibia. For fun, she loves movies, inspiring discussions, roller-blading, skiing, and travel!

Manuela Wagner holds an M.A in English studies and Marketing and a Ph.D. in English studies with a specialization in linguistics from Graz University, Austria. During her graduate studies she spent 2 years in the baby lab of Psychophysics in the department of Neurophysiology at the Max-Planck-Institute for Brain Research in Frankfurt/Main, Germany, and 3 years in the Department of Human Development and Psychology at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Her research interests include pragmatic development in first and second language acquisition, world language teaching methodology, intercultural communication, communicative development in special circumstances, and humor in the world language classroom. As director of the Critical Languages Program Manuela also engages in research in less commonly taught languages. She teaches courses in world language teaching theory and pedagogy, pragmatics, introduction to linguistics, as well as German language and culture.

Friedemann Weidauer was born in Stuttgart, Germany. He received his BA in Classics from Reed College, Zwischenpruefung in German, American Studies and Education from the FU Berlin, and MA and PhD in German from the University of Wisconsin/Madison. His research and teaching focus on post-1945 East and West German culture, among his recent publications are articles on Jurek Becker, Wolfgang Borchert and minority literatures. Current research projects include the debate about the Moscow Trials among German authors in exile (1933- 1945) and a series of studies of East German Kulturpolitik as reflected in DEFA films.

Sebastian Wogenstein's research and teaching focuses on 20th-century German literature with emphasis on German-Jewish literature, theater, and the intersection of literature and human rights. He is the author of a monograph, Horizonte der Moderne: Tragoedie und Judentum von Cohen bis Levinas (Horizons of Modernity: Tragedy and Judaism from Cohen to Levinas, 2011), and co-editor of the book An Grenzen: Literarische Erkundungen (On Borders: Literary Explorations, 2007), a volume focusing on borders, acts of border crossings, and the de/construction of borders. He edited a special issue of Germanic Review, titled "Zionism and Its Discontents," and published articles in Germanic Review, Monatshefte, Gegenwartsliteratur, Naharaim, and Telos. Sebastian Wogenstein is a faculty associate of the Human Rights Institute and currently a fellow at the University of Connecticut Humanities Institute. He studied German Literature, American Studies, and Political Science at the University of Tuebingen, received an M.A. in European Studies from Washington University in St. Louis, and studied at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, where he also worked for the Franz Rosenzweig Center for German-Jewish Literature and Cultural History. He received his doctoral degree from the University of Tuebingen in 2005.