Faculty

The Graduate Group in German Languages and Literatures

Core and affiliate members of the graduate group direct dissertation committees, and participate in the faculty-graduate student colloquium.

Core Faculty

Christina Frei, Ph.D., University of California at Davis
Director of Language Instruction
Academic Director, Penn Language Center
Adjunct Assistant Professor, Graduate School of Education
Second language acquisition, discourse analysis, and computer mediated communication (CMC)

Kathryn Hellerstein, Ph.D., Stanford University
Undergraduate Director, Jewish Studies Program
Yiddish language, Yiddish literature in translation, gender and Jewish literature, Jewish American literature, Jewish film, literary translation

Eric Jarosinski, Ph.D., University of Wisconsin-Madison
20th-century literature, literary theory, cultural studies

Catriona MacLeod, Ph.D., Harvard University
Goethe, 19th-century literature, inter-arts, gender studies

Simon Richter, Ph.D., Johns Hopkins University
Interim Department Chair
18th-century literature, gender studies, literary theory, cultural studies, history of the body, Dutch

Liliane Weissberg, Ph.D., Harvard University
Graduate Chair
18th-century literature, comparative literature, aesthetic theory, German-Jewish writing

Bethany Wiggin, Ph.D. University of Minnesota
Undergraduate Chair
Intersections between the early modern period and contemporary theoretical concerns including gender and postcolonial studies

Affiliate Faculty

Rita Barnard, Ph.D., Duke University
Professor of English, and Director, Women's Studies Program and the Alice Paul Center for Research on Women, Gender, and Sexuality
Twentieth-century American literature, postcolonial studies (especially African and South African literature), modernism, globalization and transnational cultural studies, and contemporary women writers

Dan Ben-Amos, Ph.D., Indiana University
Professor of Near Eastern Languages & Civilizations and Folklore
Fairy tale, Grimm brothers, Yiddish folk tales, Nazi-era Volkskunde

Karen Beckman, Ph.D., Princeton University
Jaffe Associate Professor, Department of History of Art
Cinema and modern Media

Warren Breckman, Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley
Associate Professor of History
Hegel, Marx, 19th and 20th century German and European intellectual and cultural history, and contemporary theory

Thomas Childers, Ph.D., Harvard University
Sheldon and Lucy Hackney Professor of History
Modern German history (Weimar, Nazi period)

Timothy Corrigan, Ph.D.
Professor of English and Director of Cinema Studies
Film studies, modern American and German cinema, and pedagogy

Emily Dolan, Ph.D., Cornell University
Assistant Professor of History of Music
18th- and early 19th-century music and aesthetics

Andre Dombrowski, Ph.D., UC Berkeley
Assistant Professor of History of Art
Art and material culture of France, Germany and Britain in the mid to late nineteenth century, with an emphasis on cross-national developments in the histories of science, politics, psychology, and sexuality.

Steven Feierman, Ph.D., Northwestern University, D. of Phil., Oxford
Professor of History and History and Sociology of Science
Africa, history of medicine in East Africa formerly colonized by Germany

Jeffrey Kallberg, Ph.D., University of Chicago
Professor and Chair of the Department of Music
19th & 20th century music, Scandinavian studies

Ellen Kennedy, Ph.D., London School of Economics
Professor of Political Science
Political theory, jurisprudence and legal theory, comparative government,
Western Europe, Carl Schmitt, Hugo Ball, Frankfurt School, political philosophy, Bundesbank

David Leatherbarrow, Ph.D., University of Essex
Professor of Architecture, and Chair, Graduate Group in Architecture, School of Design
Architectural theory and design studios

Robert Maxwell, Ph.D., Yale University
Associate Professor in Medieval Art and Architecture, Department of History of Art
Art of the Middle Ages, specializing in the sculpture, architecture, and manuscripts of the Romanesque and Early Gothic periods, medieval art's historiography

Benjamin Nathans, Ph.D.
Ronald S. Lauder Endowed Term Associate Professor of History
Habermas, the public sphere in eighteenth-century France, Russian-Jewish historiography, the state of the field of Russian and East European studies in Germany and the United States, modern Jewish history

Monroe Price, Ph.D.
Director of Center for Global Communication Studies and Adjunct Full Professor, Annenberg School of Communication

Jean-Michel Rabaté, Ph.D.
Professor of English and Comparative Literature
Thomas Bernhard, Broch, Hegel, psychoanalysis, Vienna, and literary theory

Donald Ringe, Ph.D., Yale University
Kahn Term Professor in Linguistics and Department Chair
Historical linguistics, Indo-European linguistics (Greek, Tocharian, Germanic), morphology

Thomas Max Safley, Ph.D., University of Wisconsin
Professor of European History
Renaissance and Reformation, early modern Europe

Larry Silver, Ph.D., Harvard University
Farquhar Professor of Art History
Painting and graphics of Northern Europe, particularly Germany and the Netherlands during the era of Renaissance and Reformation, film

Jonathan Steinberg, Ph.D.
Walter H. Annenberg Professor of Modern European History
Modern Europe since 1789 with specialization in the German and Austrian Empires, Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, modern Jewish history, Switzerland, Deutsche Bank

Ilya Vinitsky, Ph.D., Moscow State Pedagogical University
Assistant Professor, Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures
Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Russian literature, the history of psychiatry, and nineteenth-century intellectual and spiritual history

David Wallace, Ph.D., Cambridge University
Judith Rodin Professor of English, Department of English
Medieval and early modern European literature, including German and Dutch

Xiaojue Wang, Ph.D., Columbia University
Assistant Professor of Chinese Literature and Culture, Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures
Modern and contemporary Chinese literature and film and comparative literature, with special focus on the relationship among literature, culture and politics. This includes literature and culture across mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong and overseas, as well as transnational cultural interactions

Faculty Emeriti

Francis B. Brévart, Ph.D., McGill University
Medieval studies (12 th – 15 th centuries): Sachliteratur and cultural history; daily life in the Middle Ages; history of medicine and pharmacy; occult literature; history of education; Middle High German literature; manuscripts and text edition; Business German

Horst S. Daemmrich, Ph.D., University of Chicago
Professor Emeritus of German and Comparative Literature

Albert L. Lloyd, Ph.D., George Washington University
Distinguished Professor Emeritus of German Philology

Karl F. Otto, Jr., Ph.D., Northwestern University
Professor Emeritus of German
Baroque literature, Sprachgesellschaften, language pedagogy

Frank Trommler, Dr. Phil., University of Munich
Professor Emeritus of German
19th- and 20th-century literature, modernism, cultural studies

Visiting Faculty

Yasemin Dayioglu-Yucel, Ph.D., Georg-August-Universitaet, Germany
DAAD Visiting Professor, German Department, University of Hamburg, Germany.

Louise Hecht, Ph.D., Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel
Fulbright Fellow from the Palacky University, Olomouc, Czech Republic

Christophe Madelein, Ph.D., University of Ghent, Belgium
Brueghel Visiting Professor

Lecturers

Alexander Botwinik
Lecturer in Yiddish

Edward Dixon, Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania
Lecturer and Coordinator for Technology in Foreign Languages

Dana Grozdanic, Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania
Lecturer

David James, Ph.D., University of Texas at Austin
Lecturer and Coordinator of Business German

Claudia Lynn, M.A., University of Pennsylvania
Lecturer in Foreign Language

Lusi Kintania McKinley, M.A., Otto Friedrich University, Bamberg, Germany
Lecturer

Robert Naborn, Ph.D., Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam and University of Kansas
Dutch Studies Program Director & Lecturer in Dutch

Simone Schlichting-Artur, Ed.D., University of Pennsylvania
Lecturer

Susanne Shields, Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania
Lecturer in Foreign Language

Kim-Eric Williams, D.Min., Graduate Theological Foundation
Lecturer in Swedish & Director of Swedish Language Program