Current Graduate Students -- Recent Alumni/ae
Current Graduate Students
Martin Bäumel received Master’s Degrees in German Literature (2002, University of Alabama) and History (2004, Ludwig-Maximilian-Universität München) before joining the Department of Germanic Studies in 2005. His academic interests include studies of intertextuality, historical semantics and questions of narratology and its relationship to popular and critical thought. His translations are published in A Companion to the Works of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (Camden House, ed. Barbara Fischer and Thomas C. Fox). His current focus is on concepts of Bildung, particularly with relation to the ‘bildungsferne Schichten’ of the 18th century. Martin is co-founder of the Novalis reading group at UofC, a long-term project whose goal is an annotated online-edition of the author’s Allgemeines Brouillon. He is also involved in an anthology project on the concept of genius from Plato to Benn headed by Prof. Christiane Frey.
Email: mbaeumel@uchicago.edu
Joshua Clemente Bonilla graduated from Princeton University with a degree in Germanic Studies, and in 2005/6 he earned a master’s degree at the University of Chicago. His interests include the appropriation of theological language during the Enlightenment and early German Romanticism, particularly with reference to political and aesthetic teleologies. In addition, Joshua is interested in the German reception of 17th Century Spanish literature. In the fall of 2006 Joshua was the graduate adviser for a University of Chicago undergraduate program at the Universität Freiburg. His teaching experience includes courses on 20th Century German language drama and post-war German film.
Email: bonilla@uchicago.edu
Hannah Eldridge received her B.A. from the University of
California, Berkeley in 2006. She is interested in lyric
poetry and the borders between language and music.
Email: hveldrid@uchicago.edu
David Greeves graduated from New York University and obtained his MA from Freie Universität in Berlin. Among his manifold interests are psychology and literature, rhetoric, aesthetics and literary theory, and avant-garde. He is currently in his seventh year and is again spending another year in Berlin writing his dissertation. Its latest working title is, "Viscid Thoughts-Vibrant Words, the emergence of the concept of authenticity in post-enlightenment Germany (Klopstock, Herder, Goethe)."
Email: drgreeve@midway.uchicago.edu
Georginna Hinnebusch received her B.A. from Yale University. She then spent four years studying in Germany
on various scholarships including the Bosch, Berliner Abgeordnetenhaus and the Luftbrueckendank. Her interests include Weimar Classicism, Romanticism, and Idealist philosophy.
Email: georginna@uchicago.edu
After receiving her M. A. in 1999 from this department, Kym Lanzetta spent three years in Berlin where she worked in film as a costume designer, translated for the English version of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, subtitled films, and taught Berliners how to dance salsa. Since returning to the department in 2002, she has been working on her dissertation project which will trace notions of sacrifice in East and West Germany in the 1960s and 70s. Working titles include: Utopian Sacrifices or Between Hingabe und Eigensinn. Her interests include visual art, film, and aesthetics and she still likes a good twirl on the dance floor.
Email: lanzetta@uchicago.edu
Joel Lande is working on a dissertation project on the portrayal of
political and familial authority in German Enlightenment tragedy. He
has also written on mythology as a model of aesthetic production during
the Romantic period. From April 2007-September 2008, he was guest at
the Graduiertenkolleg 'Figur des Dritten' at the Universität Konstanz.
Email: jblande@uchicago.edu
Katharina Loew received her M.A. in Theater Studies from the University of Munich in 1999. After having spent several years teaching German in Munich, Berlin and Warsaw, she currently pursues a joint degree in Cinema and Media Studies and Germanic Studies. Her dissertation will be concerned with the fantastic/uncanny in German silent film.
Email: kloew@uchicago.edu
Anthony Edwards Mahler received his B.A. in German Literature and Language from the University of Pennsylvania and comes to the University of Chicago after a year of study at the Humboldt Universität zu Berlin.
Email: aemahler@uchicago.edu
Malika Maskarinec received her B.A.in German Literature and Philosophy from Reed College in 2005. She spent the following year in Germany on a Fulbright Fellowship. Her current areas of interest are philosophy from Kant to Wittgenstein and 20th century literature and film.
Email: maskarinec@uchicago.edu
James McCormick completed a BA in Literature from Yale
University in 2003 and entered the University of Chicago in
2004. He is pursuing a joint degree with Germanic Studies and
the Committee on Social Thought and is interested in German
idealism, modernism, and theories of action and agency.
Email: jmccorm@uchicago.edu
Nerina Muzurovic received her B.A. in Germanic Studies from the University of Chicago. She has passed her PhD. exams and is currently researching for her disseration.
Email: nerina@uchicago.edu
Amanda Norton graduated from Williams College in 2000 with a degree in German and Literary Studies. After a Fulbright year in Vienna and a year in the graduate program at Princeton, she came to the U of C in 2002. Her interests include Austrian and German literature of the 20th century. She currently works as an academic advisor in the Office of the Dean of Students in the College at the U of C. She plans to defend her dissertation, entitled “Against Fanaticism: Ethical Humanisms in German Literature and Criticism, 1918-1958,” in the fall of 2008. Amanda also has an article on Kleist (German Quarterly) and an article on Erich Auerbach (Monatshefte) appearing in 2008.
Email: anorton@uchicago.edu
Dagmar Pfensig studied in Berlin and St. Louis, where she received her M. A. in 1999. In 2000 she received an M. A. in North-American Studies and Germanic Studies from Freie Universität, Berlin. She worked as a dramaturge and production manager for theatre productions mostly in Southeastern Europe and festivals (Theaterformen, Hannover, Theorem, Paris, Hebbel Theater, Berlin) before she joined the department in 2005. Interested in the intersection of theory and performance (site-specific live-art projects) she collaborated with Constanza Macras (“Back to the Present”) and Javor Gardev (“Marat/Sade”).
One of her research interests is literature during the Third Reich, especially the reception of Modernist literature during that period. Dagmar has also co-edited and published an essay on Paul Valéry and Eugen Gottlob Winkler in: Zwischen den Zeiten. Junge Literatur in Deutschland von 1933 bis 1945 (Ed. Lotos, 2000). She occasionally translates literary and theatrical texts (e.g. Maurice Blanchot, Forced Entertainment). She was also part of the anthology-project Literatur im Dritten Reich between 1989 and 2001 led by Prof. Horst Denkler, FU Berlin.
Her current research focuses on the correlation between aesthetics and neurologic-theory during the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries. She is also the co-founder of the Novalis independent-study group on Das Allgemeine Brouillon. This long-term project sets out to annotate an online-edition of the text. Her latest works include texts on Alexander von Humboldt (“Der Körper als Excitator”) and Rainer Maria Rilke (“Rilkes Hantologien”). Additionally, she is currently taking part in an anthology project initiated by Christiane Frey tracing the history of Genius from Plato to Benn.
Email: dpfensig@uchicago.edu
Christian Pinawin is interested in the Age of Goethe, the philosophy and literature of the Enlightenment, lyric poetry, and aesthetics.
Email: cpinawin@uchicago.edu
Elisa C. Primavera studied Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies in Copenhagen and Berlin, where she received her MA in 2003 with a thesis on the aesthetics of the female slender body in contemporary fiction. Her interests include 18th through 20th century literature; concepts of the body and the senses; cultural construction of emotions; philosophical aesthetics. In Fall 2005, she coordinated the College’s Study Abroad program in Freiburg, where she also taught a class on Expressionism. She is working on her dissertation, a study on the discourse of necessary pain in Nietzsche, Benn, Jünger and others.
Email: primaver@uchicago.edu
Bastian Reinert has studied German Literature, History, and North
American Literature in Berlin (Free University and Humboldt
University), London (University College), and St. Louis, MO
(Washington University), where he received his M.A. in 2006. Before
joining the Department of Germanic Studies at UofC in 2007, he gained
editorial experience in a German publishing house in Berlin, worked as
a research assistant and taught several freshman tutorials (the
epistolary novel, Georg Büchner, Ingeborg Bachmann, and Paul Celan).
His research interests include 20th century Jewish-German literature
(especially postwar poetry: Paul Celan, Nelly Sachs, and Ilse
Aichinger), intertextuality, narratology, and Frankfurt School/
Critical Theory.
Forthcoming in Fall 2008 is his first book: "Wir taten ein Schweigen
darüber": Name, Zitat und Zeugenschaft in Paul Celans
'Engführung' (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann).
His current focus is on a structuralist amalgamation of most of his
academic interests in a study on certain aspects of narrative theory
in German literature from late 18th century (Jean Paul’s prose) to the
present (Elfriede Jelinek’s drama). This project will combine theories
of the subject (Kant-Hegel-Nietzsche-Heidegger-Freud-Lacan) and
aesthetics (from Kant to Adorno) with Holocaust studies (Agamben,
Arendt, and others) and debates on the death of the author (Barthes,
Foucault, and Eco).
Email: bastianreinert@uchicago.edu
Leigh Ann Smith-Gary graduated from Princeton in 2004 with an BA in German and Political Theory and certificates in European Cultural Studies and Contemporary European Politics. Her undergraduate thesis explored the relation of aesthetics to power, and specifically the dynamics of subject formation, in the poetry of the Prenzlauer Berg in the 1970s and 80s (Sascha Anderson, Bert Papenfuss-Gorek). After spending a year in Berlin on a DAAD Fellowship, she completed a master’s exam on concepts of madness and genius from Kant to Musil at Chicago in the spring of 2006. She currently focuses on (poetic) conceptions of poetic media (including soul, body and voice) in Novalis, Heine, Moerike and Kafka.
Email: lasg@uchicago.edu
Jens Wörner studied German Literature, Philosophy, and Biology at Warwick University on a DAAD Fellowship and mainly in Konstanz, where he received his State-Exam and M.A. in 2006. He worked as a research and editorial assistant and gave tutorials. Long since involved in the “Two Cultures”, Jens is especially concerned with anthropological and interdisciplinary questions. His academic interests circle around 19th and early 20th century literature, aesthetics, theatricality, and literary theory. He wrote a thesis on Ernst Jünger’s essays in the 1930’s that focuses on the relation of rhetoric and upcoming forms of political organization. Joining the program at the University of Chicago in 2007, he again and again works on the intersection of literature and philosophy, now turning towards German Idealism and Wittgenstein.
Email: jwoerner@uchicago.edu
Mimmi Woisnitza received her Diploma in Cultural Studies with a major in literary studies from the European University Viadrina in Frankfurt/Oder in 2006 and joined the Department of Germanic Studies in 2007. Her
interests include literary theory, poetics and the intersection of literature and philosophy with a current focus on modern and contemporary Austrian literature.
Email: mwoisnitza@uchicago.edu
Terri Zhu currently resides in Los Angeles and is working on a dissertation on the literary aesthetics of everyday life in 19th-century Germany.
Email: tzhu@midway.uchicago.edu