The GLL Faculty

Graduate Faculty and Research

  Our faculty is widely published and internationally active in the major fields of German Studies, including literature and culture, film studies, historical and applied linguistics, and Second Language Acquisition (SLA). Research specialties include: environmental humanities; avant-garde visual traditions; the relationship between law, politics, and literature; German-Jewish Studies; 19th-century intellectual history; Romanticism; gender studies; fin de siècle Vienna; literary theory, especially narrative theory; medieval education; remakes, remixes, and adaptations; post-war literature; paleography; interactional competence in L2; conversation analysis. As a department, we are committed to both the core of the German tradition and interdisciplinary work.

JJ Aupiais:  Post- and decolonial German Studies, transnational literary studies, translation studies
Mathew Birkhold:  Law, culture, and the humanities, environmental humanities, German literature 1750- 1945, Indigenous studies
Katra Byram:  Narrative theory, ecocriticism, gender and cultural memory, German literature 1848-present
John Davidson:  Film aesthetics and history, German feature and avant-garde, adaptations
Anna Grotans:  Medieval Studies, Latin and German Paleography, Medieval Education, Language Contact in the Middle Ages
Merrill Kaplan:  Old Norse-Icelandic literature, folk legend and rumor, folklore on and off the internet
May Mergenthaler:  Poetry (17th century-present), literary and aesthetic theory, criticism, ecocriticism
Cynthia D. Porter:  Body Studies, Comparative Media Analysis, German and African Diaspora Studies
Paul Reitter:  German-Jewish culture, history of higher education, fin-de-siècle Europe, translation studies
Carmen Taleghani-Nikazm:  Applied linguistics, conversation analysis, interactional competence in second language

SPOTLIGHT

Faculty Research Initiative Video Series: Katra Byram 

What is narrative theory? How does the structure of a story actually affect what that story means? Professor Katra Byram, from the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures, discusses her interest in how stories work as well as her current research into memoirs and novels about mothers and grandmothers of the World War II era.

SPOTLIGHT

Translating Marx's Capital in the 21st Century: Paul Reitter

  Speaking at the recent Harvard Colloquium for Intellectual History, accomplished scholar and translator Paul Reitter, known for works such as The Anti-Journalist: Karl Kraus and Jewish Self-Fashioning in Fin-de-Siècle Europe (University of Chicago Press, 2008), On the Origins of Jewish Self-Hatred (Princeton University Press, 2012), and The Kraus Project with Jonathan Franzen (Macmillan Publishers, 2013), offered his reflections on his current project, an annotated English edition of Karl Marx's Capital.   

  Capital: Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1, edited and translated by Reitter, is slated to be published in mid-September, 2024 by Princeton University Press.

  Visit our News section and the faculty people pages to find journal articles, podcasts, and other publication information. 

Selected books by GLL faculty

Our faculty covers the full range of German Studies while working beyond traditional disciplinary boundaries to reach a broad academic and general audience. Our faculty publishes in the leading German and interdisciplinary journals. And they write for the popular press and have collaborated with contemporary authors like Jonathan Franzen and the Austrian librettist and filmmaker Klaus Händl.