Program Development
A thriving academic community is essential to effective research and teaching, especially in the foreign languages. As director of the MA program in German Studies at UNL, I have overhauled the program, creating easier pathways for students to complete K-12 teacher certification as part of their program, while also developing more robust connections to other academic programs that serve students wishing to continue on for a PhD. I have also developed a new colloquium that integrates our students into a wider discussion of German literature and culture.
At the University of Maryland, I established an interdisciplinary research community around the environmental humanities, and organized the visit of Viennese rapper Yasmo to the UMD campus, the Austrian Embassy, and the 2019 Austrian Studies Association conference. At Vanderbilt, I helped the German Department dramatically expand its extracurricular offerings, particularly focusing on activities of interest to undergraduates. I established a new Friday evening conversation event ("Stammtisch") that has been highly successful with undergraduate and graduate students alike, and cofounded the German Department Visual Culture Seminar. Tasked with organizing the first Gisela Mosig Lecture Series, I developed a format in which the three visiting speakers would conduct a graduate workshop and separately give a lecture explicitly intended to be of interest to an undergraduate audience, and these lectures - on German Comic Books, Stefan Zweig, and Black German Fiction - saw unprecedented attendance both of undergraduate students and members of the public. I also led efforts to organize the TN-AATGs annual Frühlingsfest event at Vanderbilt in 2017. In 2017, I received the Gisela Mosig Award for Outstanding Service from the Vanderbilt German Department.