About Us

Associate Professor of German Studies [Bio]
University of Minnesota Duluth

Dan Nolan is an Assistant Professor of German Studies teaching at the University of Minnesota Duluth.  His research in literary criticism focuses on gestures of truthfulness in the emerging republics of Germany and Russia in the 18th and 19th centuries.  He also works on Mobile Language Learning, and helped to found the Mobile Language Learning Group at UMD. Working with students and faculty from across the campus, the Mobile Language Learning Group develops applications that tap into the potential of emerging mobile computational devices to augment a variety of aspects of second language acquisition.  Check out the German Grammar Guide and the forthcoming Russian Grammar Guide on the Apple App store.  In 2013 he founded the Russian Area Studies program at UMD with a focus on media studies and digital culture. His interests in digital culture and digital humanities are also evident in his work with Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL) projects at UMD.  Over the past year Dan helped to setup a COIL Fellow program at UMD that will help faculty develop international learning experiences that connect our students with their peers around the world.  Dan’s work coordinating support for COIL development at UMD is based in part on his experience as part of a Peer-to-Peer Dialogue program grant, New Steps International.

PhD Candidate in German [Bio]
University of Wisconsin-Madison

In 2016, Nicole Fischer graduated from the University of Regensburg. Her majors were German, Physical Education, and English as part of her teacher training. In addition, she received a M.A. in German Studies from Vanderbilt University (Nashville, TN) in 2012. Her thesis focused on Novalis, his Heinrich von Ofterdingen, and the philosophy of nature of the German epoch of Romanticism.

Nicole’s interest in Environmental Humanities has guided her to pursue a PhD at UW-Madison with a future project that will view German literature through an ecocritical lens. Furthermore, she will complete a minor in the field of SLA and a Certificate in Environmental Humanities.

Professor of German, and Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies
Director of the Center for German and European Studies [Bio]
Brandeis University

Sabine von Mering, holds a Ph.D. in German Studies from the University of California, Davis and is Professor of German and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (OTS), a core member of the program faculty in the Environmental Studies Program since 2017, affiliated with the Creativity, the Arts, and Social Transformation minor, and Director of the Center for German and European Studies (CGES) at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts, USA. Her latest publications include her co-edited Routledge Handbook of Grassroots Climate Activism (2025), and her English translation of German climate activists Luisa Neubauer and Alexander Repenning’s Beginning to End the Climate Crisis. A History of Our Future (2023). She was a 2023 Public Voices Fellows on the Climate Crisis with The OpEd Project, in partnership with the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication.