I joined the Carleton German Program in fall 2020; before that, I taught at St. Olaf College and the University of Minnesota. My teaching at Carleton spans from beginning German to advanced seminars on literature, film, and cultural theory. I am particularly interested in how courses focused on language skills, cultural competency, and interpretation of creative texts can contribute to efforts for environmental sustainability and social justice that extend beyond the classroom.
My research interests lie at the intersection of German literature, film, and environmental studies. Beyond the schools where I’ve earned degrees, I’ve spent a year at the Universität Hamburg and am a member of the Society of Fellows at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society in Munich. I also taught English with the Fulbright TA program in Austria, had a job milking cows on an Alpine dairy farm near Salzburg, and worked for a wilderness program in southwest Utah.
I look forward to seeing you in class, at Mittagstisch (the German language table), and in office hours—please stop by! You can click on the calendar link to the left to make an appointment.
Education
PhD, Harvard University, 2015
BA and BMus, Northwestern University, 2004
Professional History
Assistant Professor, Carleton College (current)
Visiting Assistant Professor, Saint Olaf College, 2017–2020
Visiting Assistant Professor, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, 2016–2017
Visiting Assistant Professor, University of Minnesota Duluth, 2015–2016
Instructor, Harvard Summer School, Summer 2015
At Carleton since 2020.
Highlights & Recent Activity
German Minor Coordinator at Carleton College
Co-Chair, Climate Emergency and Technology Committee, German Studies Association
Selected Recent Publications:
Film History for the Anthropocene: The Ecological Archive of German Cinema. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2023. Part of Camden House book series, “Screen Cultures: German Film and the Visual.” https://boydellandbrewer.com/9781640141612/film-history-for-the-anthropocene/
“Heimat for One? Spaces of Community and Disability in Arbeit und Struktur and Tschick.” In Heimat and Migration: Reimagining the Regional and the Global in the Twenty-First Century, ed. Len Cagle, Thomas Herold, and Gabriele Maier, 203–226. Berlin: DeGruyter, 2023. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110733150-010.
“Assessments and Accessibility: Building a Critical German Program at Carleton College.” Co-authored with Kiley Kost and Juliane Schicker. Die Unterrichtspraxis/Teaching German 55, no. 2 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1111/tger.12235.
Selected Awards:
Mellon Periclean Faculty Leader in the Humanities, 2022-23.
DAAD funding to lead environmental humanities seminar in Minneapolis and Munich, 2023.
Student Research Partnership (Carleton College), 2020, 2021, 2022.
Best Article in Die Unterrichtspraxis / Teaching German, 2020, with co-author Amanda Randall, for article “Unpacking Heimat: A Spiraled Approach to Identity and Belonging for Global German Studies” (2019).
Curriculum Development Grant (Carleton College), 2020.
ACTFL Small Undergraduate German Program Special Interest Group Award for Outstanding German Program Development and Advocacy, with Prof. Amanda Randall, 2019.
Rachel Carson Fellowship for work at Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society in Munich, Germany, summer 2019.
Fulbright IIE Grant, full-year research grant for study in Germany, 2013-2014.
Organizations & Scholarly Affiliations
American Association of Teachers of German (AATG)
American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL)
German Studies Association (GSA)
Society of Fellows, Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society (RCC)
Teaching can inspire, not only in the sense of a platitude that makes teachers feel good about themselves as they stay up all night grading, but in the etymological sense of in-spirare, breathing in. Teaching gives students new metaphorical air to breathe into their intellectual lungs as they move through college and expand their frameworks for understanding the world. In my work, three crucial components contribute to this process: I provide new cultural perspectives and theoretical approaches, I work to include and invite diverse viewpoints, and I expand the learning experience beyond the confines of the classroom. I am still early in my journey as an educator, but already these efforts have borne fruit: during the three years before I came to Carleton, I helped to transform a small German department into a nationally-recognized program.
Often inspiration comes in the form of fresh air within a familiar space. Language study can lead students to inhabit what Claire Kramsch describes as a “third place” or “third culture” between their home culture and the culture studied in class; it thus expands their experiences at home as much as their opportunities abroad. One of my recent students graduated without ever spending time in a German-speaking country due to limited flexibility as a varsity athlete, pre-med student, and double major in German and biology. Upon graduating, the student nonetheless expressed joy at the perspective she had gained through her work in German. Despite staying in the USA throughout her college career, her research projects showed a degree of thoughtfulness regarding cultural differences that will serve her well throughout her medical career.
My classes also provide new critical approaches and analytical tools that enrich familiar tasks. In my classes on film, students learn to understand the rhetoric of images that often works much more powerfully than the film plots that had hitherto garnered their attention; further, they learn to critique the culture industries that may have unconsciously formed their habits as image consumers. At the same time, they explore what Scott MacDonald has described as environmental films’ ability to create a “garden in the [cinematic] machine” (inverting Leo Marx’s phrase regarding the trope of “the machine in the garden” in North American nature writing). With all of these analytical tools, the most impressive learning takes place when my students become critically aware creators. My environmental film students create their own “city symphonies” about their local environments. My fairy tale students rewrite familiar tales for their own times. Students in my capstone German seminar create research blogs and public presentations on complex aspects of identity and environment in the German-speaking world. These projects allow students to delve deeply into creative tasks, armed with new critical tools to expand their roles as thoughtful, engaged, and creative participants in their societies and communities.
In order for these projects to succeed, I must actively work to engage all students. This process starts small: I build rapport with students from diverse backgrounds, identify and eliminate barriers to learning, and pique students’ curiosity before asking them to learn content. Then, as I continue through each course, I make sure that intellectual rigor is paired with exploration and creativity. To return to the initial metaphor: the process of inspiration is not a one-way street in which my content gives new air for students to breathe; I must also expand the classroom environment to benefit from the fresh perspectives that all students have to offer. Students bring many forms of diversity, both visible and invisible. In my first experience teaching German as a grad student at Harvard, I worked with two first-generation college students who were anxious because they felt like the only students who had never learned a foreign language before. These students needed initial mentoring to grow accustomed to the discomfort that all students feel when immersed in a foreign language. Eventually, they thrived in my class, became two of the strongest students in the department, and won fellowships to work and do research in Germany, but they first needed to be invited into the conversation and mentored on how to engage with the material. Since then, I have encountered further types of “invisible” diversity: students juggling roles as a single parent and full-time student; students balancing their course schedules with intensive work schedules due to financial need; students struggling with mental illness who need support in connecting with resources on a new campus. In each of these cases, by engaging with students individually, I have helped them to fully access the course content in ways that met their needs and made no compromises in terms of content or rigor.
Not all problems of access can be met simply through mentoring and brainstorming. During my first semester teaching a large course on fairy tales, I worked closely with one student throughout half of the semester to try to help the student succeed. In the end, the student dropped the course because the workload was simply too onerous. I had created a syllabus that involved rigorous analytic work and engaging, creative writing tasks; I had also chosen texts that displayed diversity in geographic and cultural origin. But I had not allowed time and flexibility to support the students who were not already comfortable in a college-level literature class. In essence, my class was rewarding—or punishing—the educational experiences that students had completed before my class began. During the following summer, I closely considered the learning goals in relation to the workload. Without sacrificing any of the key objectives, concepts, texts, or assessments, I was able to trim the required weekly reading and writing tasks, while still providing optional additional readings for students who wanted to go into further depth. The results were encouraging: in both student evaluations and the spread of grades, results aligned closely with the effort students put into the course, while prior skill played a much smaller role. For this and other courses, I continue to revise my syllabi, engage in difficult conversations, and seek critical comments from colleagues on campus and in online communities such as the working group on Diversity, Decolonization, and the German Curriculum.
My pedagogical work has focused not only on expanding the perspectives represented within the classroom, but also to expand the classroom itself through projects that engage the broader community. I developed an academic civic engagement project in my Green Germany course, and although the community partners gave very positive feedback, the project also gave rise to a number of challenges that were far afield from my prior teaching experiences. To meet these challenges, I am working to build a community of German professors who engage in community-engaged pedagogy related to environmental sustainability. I am co-organizing a seminar on this topic at the 2019 German Studies Association conference as well as a DAAD-sponsored symposium at the University of Minnesota. Further, building on my work this summer at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, I am developing a network of international Environmental Humanities scholars who are working on academic civic engagement. Community engagement, like engaging productively with diversity in the classroom, is never a completed accomplishment: rather, it is an ongoing process that will demand my attention and creativity throughout my teaching career.
Effective teaching requires immense effort, but the payoff is worth it: my students’ creativity and courage inspires me. They perform slam poetry in German in front of their peers; they work through numerous financial and logistical challenges in order to pursue their passions—whether music, art history, computer science, or renewable energy—in German-speaking countries; they carry out incisive analysis of cultural forces embedded into literature, film, and environmental history. And although my courses touch on many painful topics, from racism to global warming, my students continually impress me with the sense of positive energy and hope—and the notion that hope might still be justified—that they bring to the seemingly intractable problems at the core of my work. It is thanks to my students that oxygen keeps returning to my own intellectual lungs.
During three years as a visiting assistant professor at St. Olaf College, I helped transform the German department into a coherent, socially engaged, student-centered program; for this work my colleague Dr. Amanda Randall and I won a national award from the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages. In a tenure-track position at Carleton, I have the chance to pursue this important work over a longer timescale, together with excellent colleagues who are equally committed to building a diverse, critical, and engaged German Studies.
Scholarly Monograph
Film History for the Anthropocene: The Ecological Archive of German Cinema. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2023. https://doi.org/10.2307/jj.4032523.
Peer-Reviewed Articles and Book Chapters
“Heimat for One? Spaces of Community and Disability in Arbeit und Struktur and Tschick.” In Heimat and Migration: Reimagining the Regional and the Global in the Twenty-First Century, ed. Len Cagle, Thomas Herold, and Gabriele Maier, 203–226. Berlin: DeGruyter, 2023. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110733150-010.
“Assessments and Accessibility: Building a Critical German Program at Carleton College.” Co-authored with Kiley Kost and Juliane Schicker. Die Unterrichtspraxis/Teaching German 55, no. 2 (2023): 89–92. https://doi.org/10.1111/tger.12235.
“Image, Environment, Infrastructure: The Social Ecologies of the Bergfilm.” Humanities 10, no. 1 (2021). https://doi.org/10.3390/h10010038.
“Infrastructure, Water, Ecology: Fritz Lang’s Metropolis as Ecological Archive.” Colloquia Germanica 53, no. 2–3 (2021): 249–267.
Environment and Engagement in German Studies: Projects and Resources for Critical Environmental Thinking.” Co-authored with Kiley Kost. Die Unterrichtspraxis 54, no. 2 (2021): 245–256. https://doi.org/10.1111/tger.12174.“Decolonizing Folklore? Diversifying the Fairy Tale Curriculum.” Die Unterrichtspraxis 54, no. 1 (2021): 88–102. https://doi.org/10.1111/tger.12156.“Unpacking Heimat: A Spiraled Approach to Identity and Belonging for Global German Studies.” Co-authored with Amanda Randall. Die Unterrichtspraxis 52, no. 2 (2019): 178–186. https://doi.org/10.1111/tger.12102.“Goethe and (Um)Weltliteratur: Environment and Power in Goethe’s Literary Worlds.” Seminar: A Journal of Germanic Studies 54, no. 2 (2018): 215–230. https://doi.org/10.3138/seminar.54.2_006.
Book Reviews
Paul Dobryden, The Hygienic Apparatus: Weimar Cinema and Environmental Disorder. Book Review. The German Quarterly 96.4 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1111/gequ.12396.
German Ecocriticism in the Anthropocene, ed. Schaumann and Sullivan; and Readings in the Anthropocene: The Environmental Humanities, German Studies, and Beyond, ed. Wilke and Johnstone. Review essay. German Studies Review 42, no. 2 (May 2019): 418–421. https://doi.org/10.1353/gsr.2019.0072.
Christopher Schliephake, Urban Ecologies: City Space, Material Agency, and Environmental Politics in Contemporary Culture. Book Review. Ecozon@ 6, no. 2 (Autumn 2015): 200–203. https://doi.org/10.37536/ECOZONA.2015.6.2.682.
Other Publications
“Introduction: Sustainability and Community Engagement in German Studies.” Co-authored with Kiley Kost and Dan Nolan. Introduction to special section of peer-reviewed journal, curated with co-editors Kiley Kost and Dan Nolan. Die Unterrichtspraxis 54, no. 2 (2021): 239–244. https://doi.org/10.1111/tger.12173.
“Leni Riefenstahl, Struggle in Snow and Ice (1933)—Excerpts.” Critical introduction and annotated translation. In Mountains and the German Mind: Translations from Gessner to Messner, 1541-2009, ed. Sean Ireton and Caroline Schaumann (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2020).
“Sustainability and German Studies: From Ecocriticism to Community Engagement.” Review essay on 2019 GSA seminar on the same topic, co-authored with Kiley Kost and Dan Nolan. German Studies Review 43.2 (2020).
“Photos Not Taken.” Invited contribution to Smith College and the University of Hamburg: Stories from 55 Years of a Transatlantic Friendship, ed. Jocelyne Kolb and Rainer Nicolaysen (University of Hamburg Press, 2017).
“A Letter to Yvon Chouinard.” In “Beyond Doom and Gloom: An Exploration through Letters,” RCC Perspectives 2014.6.
I enjoy playing the tuba, cross-country skiing in the Arb, and playing with my family in the parks around Northfield.
family picture from a tram ride through Munich, Germany in summer 2020
