Melanie Adley

Melanie Adley received an AM in German Literature from the University of Pennsylvania (2008), a MA in German Literature from Tufts University (2007) and a BA in German and Spanish Literature from Boston University (2004). Before attending Tufts, she spent one year in Neumünster as a Fulbright Teaching Assistant. While working on her MA, she studied in Tübingen. Her interests include feminist and queer theory, psychoanalysis, and nineteenth- and twentieth-century German and Austrian literature. Her dissertation, Shattering Fragility: Illness, Suicide, and Refusal in fin-de-siècle Viennese Literature, focuses on unexpected means of resistance for the femme fragile in relation to the rise of psychoanalysis and its preoccupation with hysteria. 

She has presented her research domestically as well as in Germany, England, and Canada, and participated in the fourth International Marbacher Sommerschule/DAAD Meisterklasse "Menschen Beschreiben." Melanie co-organized the German graduate student conference "Crises of Language" and co-curated the exhibition "The Wolf Man Paints!". She served as graduate associate for the Gender, Sexuality and Women's Studies Program for three years and in her tenure planned the interdisciplinary graduate student conference on the future of gender and sexuality studies, "Future / No Future," and founded a monthly interdisciplinary colloquium for graduate students working on gender, sexuality and women's studies. In the fall of 2012, she led the organization of an interdisciplinary gender, sexuality, and women's studies graduate student conference entitled "(un)Safe". Her article "There's a Future in Dying" is forthcoming in Poetics Today. 

Melanie has taught German Language and Culture, Gender Studies, and Queer Theory at Tufts, Penn, and Dickinson College. She was a workshop leader for the 2010 SAS TA Training Program. For the 2010/2011 academic year she acted as a Center for Teaching and Learning (CTL) Graduate Fellow. 

With the generous support of the SAS Dissertation Completion Fellowship Melanie will finish writing her dissertation in the 2012/2013 academic year.