Contact

Deniz Gokturk
dgokturk@socrates.berkeley.edu
Deniz Gokturk was born in Istanbul, studied in Konstanz, Norwich(GB), and Berlin, where she received her Ph.D. in 1995. She joined the German Department at Berkeley in fall 2001. Her publications include a book on literary and cinematic imaginations of America in early twentieth-century German culture as well as numerous articles on migration, culture and cinema. As a translator from Turkish into German she has translated novels and co-edited an anthology of contemporary Turkish literature. She is co-editor of The German Cinema Book (2002, published by the British Film Institute, co-edited with Tim Bergfelder and Erica Carter). She has been collaborating on an interdisciplinary research project on "Axial Writing: Transnational Imagination and Cultural Policy" (funded by the Economic and Social Sciences Research Council "Transnational Communities" Program). She is currently working on a book on "Ethnic Role-Play in Immigrant Comedies." She teaches courses on "Transnational Cinemas", "Comedy & Community", "World Cinema/Global Cities", "Nation & Representation."

Tony Kaes
tkaes@socrates.berkeley.edu
Chancellor Professor of German and Film Studies and currently chair of the German Department, Professor Kaes teaches courses in modern literature, literary and cultural theory, and cinema. After his 1973 Ph.D. from Stanford University, Professor Kaes taught Comparative Literature and Film at the University of California at Irvine, serving as Director of Comparative Literature from 1978 to 1981. In Berkeley since 1981, he was Director of the Film Studies Program from 1991-98. His research concentrates on interdisciplinary and comparative aspects of Weimar culture and contemporary literature and film; literary theory and theory of cultural studies; film history and film theory. . In 2000, his book on Fritz Lang's M appeared in the British Film Institute Classics series. He is also co-editor of the first history of German film, Geschichte des deutschen Films (Metzler, 1993). Major awards: Fellowships of the Rockefeller Foundation (1978) and the Humboldt Foundation (1984/85; 1986/87); Guggenheim Fellowship (1990), President's Research Fellowship (1995).

TEAM

Tes Skogmo
tskogmo@uclink.berkeley.edu
Tes Skogmo is in her fourth year in the literature program at Berkeley. Her dissertation topic involves 20th century exile literature and identity negotiation, combining Germanistik and applied linguistics. She hopes to be able to do some ethnographic research. Other research interests include GDR literature, cultural politics, and the integration of theory and literature into the language classroom. She has taken several courses in the Graduate School of Education. In the Fall of 2000, Tes received a Berkeley Language Center fellowship to put together an introductory handbook for the teaching of literature in German 2. In 2001 she received an award as Outstanding Graduate Student Instructor. She is currently a member of the departmental Outreach Committee. This summer she translated documents for a source book on multicultural Germany, learned Latin, and prepared for the QE. She is also working on two articles: a write-up of her BLC project and an Austinian analysis of a 16th century autobiographical narrative.

David Gramling
gramling@uclink.berkeley.edu
David Gramling is a second-year German Studies doctoral student. While an undergraduate, he focused on gender studies, anthropology of the body in the Storm and Stress period, and trajectories of European literary theory from antiquity to modernism. His current efforts range from comparative studies in Turkish and German modernity, to jointly historicizing gender and nation in film, to reading translingual literatures in contemporary Germany. Other interests include discourse analysis and second-language teaching methods, and keeping up with the always challenging work of his colleagues in and beyond the department. He continues to enjoy working on the department's fledgling Gender in German Studies working group, the Berkeley-Tübingen-Wien working group, and the German Multicultural Sourcebook project.

Lore Phillips
Lore@uclink.berkeley.edu
Leonore A. Phillips is a 5th year senior currently double majoring in German and Cultural Anthropology at UC, Berkeley. She studied a year in Berlin as a Congress-Bundestag Youth Exchange Scholarship recipient and was chosen to meet with President Clinton and Chancellor Kohl during her stay. Lore has continued enriching her knowledge of Germany through academic study and personal scholarship. She has spent two-and-a-half years working with Professor D. Göktürk and Professor A. Kaes on the “Multicultural German Project” and is currently devoting herself to her Honor Thesis, which will critically examine ethno-marketing! within the larger context of a “multicultural” Germany. Lore remains connected to her “Berlin” host-family, her devotion to poetry and her love of the cinema. She is also co-president of the Undergraduate Anthropology Association and plans to find a place for both Germany and Anthropology in her future.

 

Sabrina Rahman
sabrinarahman@hotmail.com
Sabrina K. Rahman is in her first year of graduate study. At Oberlin College she earned a B.A in Art History, focusing on erotic art in Edo Japan, as well as in German Studies, writing one Honors paper on Zafer Senocak and another on two illustrated versions of Kleist's Penthesilea. She spent last year in Vienna on a Fulbright grant teaching English and researching the Jewish contribution to the fin-de-siècle Viennese art world, looking at people such as Otto Kallir-Nirenstein, Ludwig Hevesi, and Bertha Zuckerkandl. During this time she also thought a lot about the bizarre love triangle Richard Gerstl, Mathilde Schönberg, and Arnold Schönberg found themselves in. Sabrina has a tendency to listen to Krautrock, make books, and watch Werner Herzog shorts. Although she hasn't developed a specific concentration yet, she is interested in issues of multiculturalism in the Habsburg Empire and contemporary German and Austrian society, as well as a comparison of the aesthetic cultures of Austria and Japan.

Christian Buss
cbuss@butterflystorm.com
Christian Buss is a first-year German Studies doctoral student. While an undergraduate at Reed College, Christian completed a B.A in German Studies, completing a thesis on the conflicts of gender construction in Expressionist drama before being Shanghaied by a second major in Economics resulting in a published study of enrollment demand at American liberal-arts Colleges. Most recently, he spent two years continuing his economics work at a high-technology research company in Boston, developing a alternate corporate IT architecture for Global 3,500 firms designed to take advantage of Internet-centered computing. He is presently interested in the developments in social exchange between post-war Germany and the United States, the potentials for exploration of new media culture in Germany, as well as third-generation émigré writers in Germany such as Zafer Senocak, and Feridun Zaimoglu