University of Connecticut |
German Graduate Faculty
Anke Finger
Anke Finger's teaching and research interests include modernism, literature and other arts, aesthetics, media studies, interculturality, and everyday life theories and practices. The author of a book on the total artwork and modernism, Das Gesamtkunstwerk der Moderne (Vandenhoeck&Ruprecht, 2006), she recently edited (with Danielle Follett) a collection of critical essays entitled The Aesthetics of the Total Artwork: On Borders and Fragments (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011). In June 2011 she presented her continuing work in interart studies and the total artwork at a symposium on atmospheres in Karlsruhe, Germany; her talk at ISEA 2011 in Istanbul was excerpted from a new monograph project on avant-gardes and intersensoriality. A co-founder (with Rainer Guldin, Università della Svizzera Italiana, Lugano) and co-editor of Flusser Studies, Anke Finger's related scholarship in media studies focuses on the Brazilian philosopher Vilém Flusser and his interdisciplinary work (including electronic literature, intermedia arts, aesthetics and perception). Her Flusser Lecture, presented in 2009 at the University of the Arts in Berlin, is now available in print, and the expanded English edition of an introduction to Vilém Flusser was published in May 2011 by the University of Minnesota Press; it is also available in Portuguese and German. Follow her new blog on digital culture and media studies! Current research projects include a monograph on memory, everyday life, and the arts in the former GDR; a monograph on avant-gardes and the senses; and a collection of essays entitled KulturConfusão: German-Brazilian Interculturalities, co-edited with Gabi Kathoefer and Christopher Larkosh (in preparation for De Gruyter). 
Katharina von Hammerstein 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 Maria Wagner 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 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
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 faculty associate of the Human Rights 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, studied at Hebrew University in Jerusalem where he worked for the Franz Rosenzweig Center for German-Jewish Literature and Cultural History, and received his doctoral degree from the University of Tuebingen. Warning: mysql_fetch_assoc(): supplied argument is not a valid MySQL result resource in /export/www/sites/languages/programs/german/graduate/faculty.php on line 99 |
