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Gradstudent Research

  • John Benjamin recently accepted a 3-year position as Assistant Professor of German at the United States Military Academy West Point.
  • Alexander Lorenz has recently accepted a tenure-track assistant professorship in German at the University of South Carolina Upstate, to start in Fall 2018.
  • Congratulations are due to Matthias Fingerhuth, now in a multi-year postdoc position at the University of Vienna, who has recently submitted a very successful dissertation for a summer graduation.  The work's title is: Grammatical Variation in Standard German, 1900-1999: A Contrastive Corpus-Linguistic Study of Germany and Switzerland. 
  • On 8 August, Jason Roberts very successfully defended his dissertation, entitled  "TRANSFORMATIONS OF "PURITY" IN CHRISTIAN DISCOURSES OF DEMON COMPULSION THROUGH THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY, and has submitted it for a summer graduation.  He starts teaching full-time, with a split appointment at UT Austin's Depts of Slavic Studies and Religious Studies in Fall 2017.
  • Katrin Fuchs accepted a tenure-track position at Valparaiso University (Indiana), to start in Fall 2017.
  • Collin Brown has accepted a position as Instructor of Norwegian at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Washington, to start in Fall, 2017.
  • On 9 July 2017, Josch Lampe gave a talk on "The Gay Capital: Homosexuality in 19th/ 20th Century Berlin," at the 2017 American Comparative Literature Association Annual Meeting, in Utrecht.
  • On Saturday, July 22, 2017, Alexander Lorenz co-presented (with Marc Pierce) a talk on "Teaching Texas German," at the Annual Meeting of the German-Texas Heritage Society here in Austin. 
  • Matthew Sherman has just had an article appear in the Journal of Austrian Studies:  "'Zwischen zwei Welten zerissen': Class Identity and Spaces of Liminality in Musil's Die Verwirrungen des Zöglings Törleß."  Journal of Austrian Studies, 49, #3-4 (Fall-Winter 2016): 65-90.
  • Cindy Walter-Gensler has accepted a permanent position at Baylor University (Waco, Texas), starting in Fall, 2017.
  • Jake Reis successfully defended his MA report, "Oath Formulas in the Poetic Edda." 
  • Roy Casagranda successfully defended his dissertation, entitled Colonization of the Normative Realm in the Age of Instrumentality, on 1 May.
  • Kristina Schoen received a 2017-2018 fellowship from the Austin Branch of the American Association of University Women. This fellowship supports Kristina's innovative dissertation project, "Gaining Language XP through story-playing: Meaning-making and L2 learner engagement in a narrative-driven digital game."
  • Matt Anderson has been awarded a grant for summer 2017  by the "American Friends of Marbach" to conduct research for his dissertation at the Deutsches Literaturarchiv in Marbach. 
  • Our graduate students and recent alums were very well-represented at GLAC 23  in Austin  from April 20-22 2017.  The following gave papers:

    • Alex Lorenz and John Benjamin (with Cori Crane and Hans Boas), "Student Strategies and Perceptions of L2 Vocabulary Acquisition using the German Frame-Semantic Online Lexicon (G-FOL)"

    • Katrin Fuchs, "Language History as a History of Language Use"

    • Matthias Fingerhuth, "Variation in 20th Century Swiss Standard German: An Analysis across Text Types"

    •  In addition, Zoe Wyatt gave a poster presentation on "Front Rounded Vowels in New Braunfels German" and Kristina Schoen co-conducted a special pre-conference workshop on "An Introduction to Systemic Functional Linguistics for Foreign Language Instruction" (with Cori Crane).

    • Finally, recent alum Ryan Dux spoke on "English Verbs in Wisconsin Low German."

  • Zoë Wyatt was recently awarded a DAAD Fellowship to spend the 2017-2018 academic year doing dissertation research in Hamburg.
  • Josch Lampe attended the 48th Annual Northeast Modern Language Association Convention, held in Baltimore, where he organized a panel on "Human Rights and their Limits in German Literature, Film, and Theater," and also gave a talk on "Die Hermanis-Debatte und das demokratische Potenzial des Theaters" on 23 March 2017. 
  • Matthias Fingerhuth has recently accepted a postdoctoral research position in the SFB "Deutsch in Österreich. Variation – Kontakt- Perzeption“ at the University of Vienna, directed by Prof. Dr. Alexandra Lenz.  Congratulations, Matthias!
  • Katrin Fuchs recently accepted a tenure-track position at Valparaiso University (Indiana), to start in Fall 2017.
  • Matt Anderson rceived a Fulbright grant for 2017-18 to conduct his dissertation research in Germany!
  • Matthias Fingerhuth  presented a paper (co-authored with Cori Crane) entitled "Playing the Part -- Disorienting Dilemmas in Teaching about Texas German-Comanche History," at a conference on "Diversity, Decolonialization, and the German Curriculum" at the University of North Carolina Asheville on 4 March 2017.
  • At the annual conference of the Austrian Studies Association, held in Chicago (U of Illinois at Chicago hosting) from 16-19 March 2017, our program was well represented with successful papers: current graduate student Matthew Sherman spoke on "Connections and Fissures between Adalbert Stifter's 'Der heilige Abend' and 'Bergkristall'," and recent alum Cindy Walter-Gensler spoke on "The Third Reich and WWII as Intertext in Johannes Mario Simmel's Hurra wir leben noch."