Graduate Alumni of the Department of German at UC Davis
Aylin Bademsoy
Alumni Placement: Washington University in St. Louis-Assistant Professor of German and Comparative Literature
Dissertation Title: Modernity, Mobility, Capital. A Comparative Perspective on Processes of Modernization and Racialization in Germany and Turkey
Chair of Dissertation Committee: Prof. Elisabeth Krimmer
Year of Graduation: 2023
Kristin Predeck
Alumni Placement: Seeking industry work
Dissertation Title: Vowel Length in German: Use of Quality and Quantity in the Perception of Long and Short Vowels in German
Chair of Dissertation Committee: Prof. Carlee Arnett
Year of Graduation: 2022
Monika Sierkowska
Alumni Placement: High Point University, North Carolina- Instructor of German and French
Dissertation Title: Pasts That Cannot Pass: The Role of Gender in German and Polish Works of Memory
Chair of Dissertation Committee: Prof. Elisabeth Krimmer
Year of Graduation: 2021
Gregory Redmond-MA
Alumni Placement: UC Davis Medical Group
Year of Graduation: 2021
William Mahan
Alumni Placement: University of Wisconsin, Arkansas State University
Dissertation Title: The Ghosts of Humanity in German and Austrian Literature and Film from 1900 to Today
Chair of Dissertation Committee: Finney, Gail
Year of Graduation: 2019
Erin Altman-MA
Thesis Title: Multilingual Subjectivity and Written Narrative Discourse: An Analysis of U.S. University German Students' Reported Experiences
Chair of Thesis Committee: Arnett, Carlee L.
Year of Graduation: 2018
Katja Herges
Alumni Placement: University Hospital Tubingen, Germany-Department of Psychosomatic Medicine and Psychotherapy Physician
Dissertation Title: Becoming-Ill: Chronic Illness and Materiality in Visual Life Narratives in Contemporary Germany
Chair of Dissertation Committee: Krimmer, Elisabeth M
Year of Graduation: 2018
Katja Herges is a physician, neuroscientist and cultural studies scholar. Currently, she is a clinical resident at the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Ulm, Germany. She graduated with a PhD in German and a designated emphasis in Feminist Theory and Research in 2018. Before coming to Davis, she was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department of Neurological Sciences at Stanford University, where she conducted translational research on neuroimmunological diseases of the nervous system, including Multiple Sclerosis. She studied medicine at the Universities of Wuerzburg, Strasbourg, Heidelberg and Paris and received a Dr. med. from the University of Mainz.
Her interdisciplinary work is situated at the intersection of critical medical humanities, mental health, gender and sexuality studies, contemporary German life writing and visual culture. Her current book project Becoming-Ill: Chronic Illness and Materiality in Visual Life Narratives in Contemporary Germany is the first trans-disciplinary study of chronic illness in contemporary German life writing and transforms medical and cultural concepts of pathology and care.
Sascha Gerhards
Alumni Placement: Miami University; Wittenberg University
Dissertation Title: Zeitgeist of Murder: The Krimi and Social Transformation in post-1945 Germany
Chair of Dissertation Committee: Fisher, Jaimey
Year of Graduation: 2013
Sascha Gerhards is a Visiting Assistant Professor of German at Miami University in Oxford, OH. He completed his dissertation, entitled “Zeitgeist of Murder: The Krimi and Social Transformation in Post-1945 Germany,” in 2012. In the 2012-13 school year he held a Max Kade Distinguished Fellowship in German Studies at UC Davis. Sascha received his BA equivalent in English and Social Sciences from the University of Cologne, Germany, and completed his Master of Arts degree in Comparative Literature at the University of Rochester, NY. He has published an interview with acclaimed linguist Claire Kramsch on her book The Multilingual Subject, a chapter about the postwar Edgar Wallace films in volume on genre cinema, and is currently working on a contribution to the first American Anthology on the German crime genre as well as an essay on crime film in East Germany.
Christian Anderson
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Christian Anderson is an Assistant Professor of German at Cal Poly, SLO. He engages in a broad program of phenomenological research focused primarily on cultural production in German-speaking Europe. His main influences are Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Sloterdijk. Professor Anderson's current research projects cluster around the concept of transcendence. At present he is revising essays on the German Bildungsroman and on the briefly empty space in which the Berliner Stadtschloss is being reconstructed. Dr. Anderson is also working on a basic exposition of the idea of a pataphysical realm, and on a new project involving wellness and psychedelic experience.
Verena Hutter
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Year of Graduation: 2012
Verena Hutter received her Phd. in German with an emphasis on Feminist Theory in 2012. At present, she is a Visiting Assistant Professor at DePauw University in Greencastle, IN. She teaches all levels of German, Culture Courses (in German and English) and in the Women’s Studies Program. Her research interests are 20th century literature, gender studies, Jewish- German Literature and visual representation. She currently works on a book about tattoos in Germany in the twentieth century. Her most recent articles are Identity Politics and the Jewish Body in Edgar Hilsenrath’s The Nazi and the Barber for the Leo Baeck Yearbook 2013, and “Images in Skin: Tattooed Performers in 20th Century Germany, ” for The Body in a Global World (eds. Erynn Masi di Casanova and Afshan Jafar), to be published December 2013.
Tina Boyer
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Year of Graduation: 2010
Tina Boyer received her Ph.D. in Medieval German Literature and Second Language Acquisition in 2010. After graduating, she joined the Wake Forest German and Russian Department and is now teaching language courses and medieval literature and culture. Her specialization is epic literature of the German speaking countries with a focus on otherness and monstrosity. Other research interests include historical linguistics, translation of German immigrant documents, and German fairy tales. She just finished an article on: “The Theme of the Headless Giant in the Dietrich epics,” forthcoming in Heads Will Roll: Decapitation in the Medieval and Early Modern Imagination.
Nancy Corbin
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Year of Graduation: 2011
Nancy Corbin earned her Ph.D. at UC Davis in 2011. Her dissertation, entitled “Heinrich von Kleist and Enlightenment Medicine,” investigates the representation of wounds, disease and acts of corporeal communication in Kleist’s texts. Prior to this she received her BA and MA from San Francisco State University in German. She also spent a year studying at the Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen, Germany. Her areas of interest include the German Romantics, Weimar, and Critical Theory. Nancy lives in Ulm, Germany where she holds the position of “Englisch Oberstufe Lehrerin” at the Freie Waldorf Schule Ulm in Ulm, Germany. She teaches English language, literature and culture courses to students in the upper school who will complete their Abitur- or Realschulabschluß in the German high school system. Nancy is currently enrolled in a two-year Waldorf teacher training program at the Akademie für Waldorfpädogogik in Mannheim.
Bastian Heinsohn
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Year of Graduation: 2009
Bastian Heinsohn is assistant professor of German at Bucknell University (Pennsylvania), where he teaches German language and culture courses as well as seminars in Film Studies. Bastian received his Ph.D. from UC Davis in 2009. He is currently working on a book, tentatively entitled The Language of the Urban Street in German Cinema. He has published on East German cinema and recent Berlin literature. His two most recent articles are “Protesting against the New Berlin: The Local as Counterspace in Recent Berlin Literature” in Spatial Turns: Space, Place, and Mobility in German Literary and Visual Culture, edited by Jaimey Fisher and Barbara Mennel (2010) and “Beyond the Heimatfilm Genre: Criticizing the 1950s Urban Reconstruction in Germany in Ottomar Domnick’s Jonas (1957)” in: Selected Proceedings of the 2010 Southeast Conference on Foreign Languages, Literatures, and Film, edited by Will Lehman. (Boca Raton: BrownWalker Press, 2010). Bastian is currently working on a project that examines the role of graffiti as text in Berlin’s postwall urban space and its representation in recent Berlin films.
Isaac Tubb
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Year of Graduation: 2008
Isaac Tubb studied at the universities of Göttingen, Mainz, Düsseldorf and UC Davis. He received his Ph.D. in the fall of 2008 and taught at the University of California, Santa Barbara before he accepted a position at the University of Illinois. His research and teaching interests focus on the German intellectual tradition from the Enlightenment to the present. His dissertation, entitled “Illness and Insight: Melancholic Encounters with(in) History in Rainer Maria Rilke, Walter Benjamin, and Peter Handke,” explores the methodological and historical development of a specifically modern narrativity of melancholia anchored in a Benjaminian notion of contemplation and its performative expression in literary language. Benjamin’s sensitivity to figurative language and to how it presents the problem of history emerges as the red thread that runs through the project, refracting the aesthetico-philosophical concerns of both Rilke and Handke in a world they perceive as decidedly alienating. Besides preparing a book manuscript from his dissertation, Isaac Tubb is currently working on a project on the “encounter” in the works of Rainer Maria Rilke.