Graduate Students
Laura Bohn grew up in Romania, Illinois, Colorado, and, mostly, Vienna, Austria. After her Austrian Matura she attended Princeton University and graduated with a B.A. in Comparative Literature in 2003. As an exchange student, Laura also attended the universities of Freiburg, Heidelberg, and Tübingen. Her interests currently focus on the interrelation between German and Eastern European culture and literature, Hapsburg colonialism and its literary implications, as well as foreignness in German literature, past and present.
Manuel Clemens studied Cultural Studies and Philosophy in Frankfurt (Oder) and Paris. He graduated in 2005 with a diploma thesis on Adorno's notion of experience. Before joining Yale he spent a year as a Visiting Research Student in the German Department at Stanford University. He currently works on his dissertation "Moment und Prozess. Eine Phänomenologie der Zweckfreiheit" ("Moment and Process. A Phenomenology of Disinterestedness") in which he hopes to elaborate the relation between "Bildung" and "Zweckfreiheit" (education and disinterestedness) and find a good definition of "Zweckfreiheit" for the 21th century. The authors he studies are Schiller, Bergson, Freud, Simmel, Nietzsche, Thomas Mann, Foucault and Rancière.
Florian Fuchs studies Literature, Art History, Philosophy and Cultural Analysis. He wrote his B.A. thesis entitled "Hypothetik und Resistenz" on the genealogy of the 'metaphorology'-motive in Hans Blumenberg's early writings 1946-1960. He received his B.A. from the Viadrina European University in Frankfurt (Oder), while also having studied at Potsdam and the ENS in Paris. Before coming to Yale in 2011, he spent a year as Visiting Researcher at Stanford. He is especially interested in following webs of imagery, thought and language from anti-enlightenment to Jugendstil, from realism to C.G. Jung, from concept art to Daniel Kehlmann. Recent researches he conducted on Benjamin's concept of Scham, Galileo's telescopic texts and Julian Assange's Essay "Conspiracy as Governance". Whenever all that gets too thrilling, he loosely attempts to track it down in his contributions for the meta-Feuilleton-blog "Der Umblätterer".
Alexander Gardner's focus is on 19th and 20th century literary and theoretical texts. Recently, he has been thinking about how an author's use of irony might relate to his conception of history, or to his thinking about specific historical events. Texts he often returns to include those by Proust, Benjamin, Heine, Baudelaire and Robert Walser.
Nora Gortcheva holds a B.A. in Architecture and German Studies from Mount Holyoke College. At Yale, Nora entered in the Joint Ph.D. program in Film Studies and German. Nora was a visiting scholar at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste in Hamburg, at the Universität Konstanz, and at the Universität der Künste in Berlin. Her dissertation deals with cinema exhibition practices and city films in Wilhelmine and Weimar Berlin. In addition to issues in nineteenth-century visual culture, early cinema and exhibition, and urban space, Nora works on various national cinemas (German, Russian and Balkan) and film genres and forms (avant-garde, documentary, essay films). Nora also investigates the function of speech and sound in contemporary cinema and discusses language as a marker of identity in the age of global mobility and multicultural exchange.
Jason Groves, PhD candidate, entered the German department in 2005 after receiving an MA in German Studies from Johns Hopkins University. When he isn’t writing about German literature, he is thinking about political ecologies and agitating for a critical climate change in the humanities. He has published articles on Artaud, Beckett, Freud, Celan, and Robert Walser. Currently he is completing a dissertation (The Erratic: Fictions of Movement from Goethe to Benjamin) on the figure of the erratic in 19th and 20th century German literature, from the Bildungsroman to the Denkbild.
Julia Gutterman holds a B.A. in German and English Literature/Linguistics from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a Research M.A. in Literary Studies from the University of Amsterdam. Before entering the PhD program at Yale in 2009, she taught in the German Department of the University of Amsterdam. Topics of her seminars included the Historical Drama from Kleist to Heiner Müller and German Literature after World War II. In her current research she focuses on autobiographical writing/theory and more generally on the interrelation of literature and "memoria". Lately she has been ruminating over the metaphor of devouring books in its various critical implications.
Anna Henke received her B.A. in German Literature from Reed College where she wrote her thesis, Tales of Origin: The Märchen and its Discontents, on the stories we feel compelled to tell time and time again. She is currently working on her dissertation, which will focus on the various permutations of the figure of forgiveness in the critical works of Walter Benjamin.
Jason Kavett received his BA from Wesleyan University in 2009, graduating with an honors thesis on the figure of the philistine in German Romanticism. He has also studied in Regensburg and Konstanz, and joined the German Department at Yale in 2010. His interests include German aesthetic thought since the late 18 th century, early Romanticism, the novel and theater of the 19 th and early 20 th centuries, intersections of literature with the natural sciences, theories of representation, and the history of literary criticism and theory.
Hans Jochen Lind, ph.d. candidate, entered the Graduate Program in 2005 after one year at Yale as a Fulbright/Baden-Wuerttemberg Scholar. He studied Law, Literature, Philosophy, Art and Film at the Universities of Tübingen and Konstanz (Germany), Copenhagen (Denmark), Fribourg (Switzerland) and Yale (USA), holding a Law Degree from the University of Tübingen, a BA/MA-equivalent (Magister Artium) in Literature, Art, Film and Philosophy from the University of Konstanz, and a professional degree in Law (Assessor Iuris). Appointed Attorney-at-Law in 2003 by the German Barrister Association.
His interests lie in the Early 18th till Early 20th Century Literature and Philosophy (with main focus on the German Enlightenment), Literature and Media Theory (Semiotics, Aesthetics, Reader-Response-Criticism, and in general Questions of Representation) as well as in interdisciplinary approaches on Literature, Theatre, Film and Philosophy – in short the field of Media Studies from a broader perspective. His legal interests comprise the Conflict of Laws as well as Legal Theory and Legal Hermeneutics. His dissertation deals with the spatial mechanics of cognition in 18ct Epistemology.
Past projects include assistance in translating an annotating Immanuel Kant’s “Lectures on Anthropology”, ed. by Allen Wood, Cambridge University Press (forthcoming). And of course there is film…
His interests lie in the Early 18th till Early 20th Century Literature and Philosophy (with main focus on the German Enlightenment), Literature and Media Theory (Semiotics, Aesthetics, Reader-Response-Criticism, and in general Questions of Representation) as well as in interdisciplinary approaches on Literature, Theatre, Film and Philosophy – in short the field of Media Studies from a broader perspective. His legal interests comprise the Conflict of Laws as well as Legal Theory and Legal Hermeneutics. His dissertation deals with the spatial mechanics of cognition in 18ct Epistemology.
Past projects include assistance in translating an annotating Immanuel Kant’s “Lectures on Anthropology”, ed. by Allen Wood, Cambridge University Press (forthcoming). And of course there is film…
Kristina Mendocino is a PhD Candidate in the German Department at Yale University and an exchange fellow at the department for Comparative Literature at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe Universität, Frankfurt am Main. Her research moves between ancient and modern poetry and thought. She is currently working on a dissertation devoted to the choral language of ancient tragedy and its modern reception in the thinking of Friedrich Nietzsche, the poetry of Friedrich Hölderlin and the "Agamemnon" translation of Wilhelm von Humboldt -- along with its more distant echoes in poetry of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Bryn Savage received her AB in English and German from Smith College in 2004 and her MA and MPhil from Yale in 2008. She is interested in the influence of politics, culture and media on poetry and poetics from the advent of the printing press to the present day. Her dissertation, "Ernte und Auslese: German Poetry Anthologies, 1765-1795," examines the rise of the anthology in the 18th century and explores its use as a testing ground for innovations in poetics (Lessing, Herder). A lover of archives, Bryn is fascinated by the promise and problems associated with new technologies facilitating access to primary sources and the exchange of ideas.
Nadine Schwakopf studied law at the Universität Passau, Germany and UWA in Perth, Australia. After graduating from Law School, she worked as an intern at the European Parliament in Brussels and the Goethe Institut in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Nadine earned a Master’s degree in French Studies from the Université de Montréal, Canada. In 2008, she joined the PhD program of the Yale German Department. She is primarily interested in the relations between literature and the other arts, poststructuralist thought, psychoanalysis, and multimedia art practices.
Gabriela Stoicea is Romanian by birth and upbringing, but cosmopolitan by education. Before coming to Yale in 2005, she earned two translation studies degrees in Romania and the U.K., as well as an M.A. in German from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She has also studied and conducted research in Berlin, Bielefeld, Heidelberg, and Graz. She is now writing a dissertation on physiognomy in German literature, but also maintains an active interest in German cinema, various theoretical conceptualizations of translation, and women's, gender, and sexuality studies. She is a co-organizer of the Balkan Film Series, and in her free time enjoys traveling and reading Krimis.
Jan Claas van Treeck received a B.A. in Theatre Studies as well as an M.A. in German Literature from Ruhr-Universität Bochum before pursuing a career in international marketing.
After six years as a manager he felt the "call" of academia again to work on his long-abandoned dissertation on narrativity, performativity and Walter Serner. He received both his M.A. and M.Phil as well as the Prize Teaching Fellowship from Yale in 2011.
His interests center around aestheticism and the avantgardes from 1870 to 1930 and what emerged from the ashes of 90s German Pop literature as well as multimedia-art.
After six years as a manager he felt the "call" of academia again to work on his long-abandoned dissertation on narrativity, performativity and Walter Serner. He received both his M.A. and M.Phil as well as the Prize Teaching Fellowship from Yale in 2011.
His interests center around aestheticism and the avantgardes from 1870 to 1930 and what emerged from the ashes of 90s German Pop literature as well as multimedia-art.
Martin Wagner studied German language and literature in Vienna and London (UCL). He received his M.A. with a thesis on Georg Büchner from the University of Vienna in 2009 before coming to Yale. While his interests span the history of German literature from the Middle Ages to now, he is planning to focus on the literature and philosophy of the Goethezeit.
Ellwood Wiggins has a BA from St. John's college in Annapolis, MD, where he got into the addictive habit of reading and talking about great books. Despite years of graduate study and an MA in German from Johns Hopkins, he still hasn't managed to kick the habit, and is now busy reading and discussing books in the German department at Yale. He is working on a dissertation on recognition from Homer to Heiner Mueller. His interests include theater, Greek poetry and philosophy, and the culture and literature of the DDR.