Biography

Ambika is a first-year PhD student in the German Department. Her central interests are related to multilingualism and translation. A secondary line of inquiry concerns literary reflections, particularly in the 19th century, of emerging ideas in scientific, mathematical and economic thought. She is also particularly eager to explore areas of overlap with Latin American Studies and South Asian Studies. Prior to joining Berkeley, she completed a Masters in Economics at the University of Arizona, and a Masters in German Studies at Vanderbilt University.

Biography

Biography

Anna Lynn Dolman is a first-year Ph.D. candidate in the Department of German who plans to pursue Designated Emphases in Gender & Women’s Studies and Film & Media Studies. Before coming to Berkeley, she received her B.A. in Deutsche Sprache und Literatur and English Studies from University of Cologne and her M.A. in Germanic Languages and Literatures from Washington University in St. Louis. Her major research interests include late 18th- to 20th-century German literature, psychoanalysis, women’s and gender studies, film studies, poetry and poetics, creativity studies, and translation. At Berkeley, she would particularly like to work on marginalized female writers such as Annette von Droste-Hülshoff and Irmgard Keun in order to explore the subversiveness of their feminist poetics through the lenses of psychoanalytic and feminist theory while examining processes of canonization. Outside of her academic work, she enjoys writing poetry and the occasional piece of prose.

Biography

Fay Fuselier Yurwit grew up in the borderlands of southern New Mexico and received Bachelors degrees in political science and foreign languages at New Mexico State University. She studied abroad at the Philipps-Universität Marburg. She earned a Master of Arts in German Studies from the University of Arizona in Tucson. Her current interests as a first-year PhD student in German at the University of California, Berkeley center around translation, environmental humanities and film studies. She has a particular interest in horror and the grotesque in literature and cinema. Fay is also studying Russian and Yiddish.

Biography

Carolyn Hawkshaw is a PhD candidate in Germanic Linguistics. In 2004, she received her Bachelor of Music degree from McGill University (Montreal), where she majored in Musicology and studied piano with Canadian pianist Sara Laimon. She spent two years as a student at the Albert-Ludwigs-Universität in Freiburg (Breisgau), Germany, before enrolling in the Germanic Linguistics PhD Program at Berkeley in 2006. She completed the MA in Germanic Linguistics in 2008. Her research interests include historical German morphology (particularly nominal inflection), corpus linguistics, computational linguistics, older Germanic dialects, methods of linguistic reconstruction, and foreign language pedagogy. Her dissertation deals with the evolution of the weak masculine nouns in German from the 14th century through the present day.

Biography

Zainab Hossainzadeh is a graduate student in Germanic Linguistics. She received her BA in Linguistics and minors in German and Latin from the University of California, Berkeley in 2013. She is interested in syntax, semantics, computational linguistics, and cognitive linguistics, and she aims to approach her research from a cross-linguistic angle.

Biography

Molly Krueger is a PhD candidate in the Department of German with a Designated Emphasis in Jewish Studies. She received her MA from UC Berkeley in 2019 and her BA in German from Bowdoin College in 2013. She is currently at work on a dissertation that focuses on questions of history, memory, temporality, and literary form in contemporary German-Jewish writing.

Biography

Sean Lambert is a second-year graduate student in the German department pursuing Designated Emphases in Critical Theory and Film and Media Studies. He focuses on Modernism and the cultural impact of early film, as well as affect theory, Marxist literary criticism and the Frankfurt School. Outside of his academic work, he is a writer whose fiction and criticism have been published in The Chicago Review, the Cleveland Review of Books and Current Affairs. 

Biography

Michael (B.A., Vassar College; M.A., UC Berkeley) is a Ph.D. candidate in UC Berkeley’s Department of German with a Designated Emphasis in Film and Media Studies. Their dissertation, “Breakdowns and Short Circuits: Media and Modernity, 1895-1920,” argues that the concept of “breakdown” in turn-of-the-century German and Swedish literature and film was no longer exclusively a narrative terminus; instead, it became the very condition for expression. By drawing on the overlapping electrical and psychophysiological discourses of the time, Michael argues for a reevaluation of August Strindberg, Georg Kaiser, and Robert Reinert as critical theorists of affect in the age of electric media. Additional interests include the imagination and contemplative practices, the Frankfurt School, and contemporary German/Scandinavian literature and film. They have also worked as a freelance translator and as managing editor of TRANSIT: A Journal of Travel, Migration, and Multiculturalism in the German-speaking World.

Biography

Berenike Schierenberg is an international graduate student in German Studies. After having been a visiting graduate at UC Berkeley in 2016/17, she joined the Department in 2018. She studied Comparative Literature and Art History at Free University in Berlin for her B.A. (2016) and her M.A. (expected spring 2019).

Biography

Lou Silhol-Macher is a seventh-year PhD candidate in the German Department at UC Berkeley with a Designated Emphasis in Film & Media. Her research engages with new media, installation art, film and video, queer theory, philosophy of media, critical race studies, and science and technology studies. Lou’s dissertation “Of Goo and Dust: Aesthetic Theories of Formlessness” investigates the role of form/lessness in film, video, and new media art, bringing into focus what emerges from the encounter between states of matter, minoritarian aesthetic practices, and racialized histories of technology.

Lou holds an MA in German Literature & Philosophy from Ecole Normale Supérieure and an MA in Film Studies from Université Paris VIII, France. In Spring and Summer 2022, she was a DAAD Visiting Researcher at the Cluster of Excellence “Matters of Activity” at the Humboldt-University in Berlin. 

Biography

Biography

Kayla Rose van Kooten is a first-year PhD student in the German Department. She received her B.A. in International Studies and Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations from the University of Washington (2020). Prior to Berkeley, she taught English in Spain and was a Fulbright English Teaching Assistant in Germany. Her central research interests are multilingualism, Middle Eastern immigration to Germany, translation, popular culture, and social media. She is also more broadly interested in bilingual education and language technologies. She plans on pursuing a Designated Emphasis in Digital Humanities.

Biography

Elise Thora Volkmann is a first year graduate student in the Department of German. She received her B.A in German Studies and her B.M. in Voice Performance from the Oberlin College and Conservatory in 2018. After graduating from Oberlin, she attended the Peabody Conservatory at John’s Hopkins University where she received an M.M. in Musicology and Voice Performance. Her research interests include women and gender studies in Weimar Cinema, 19th and 20th century music, and German-Jewish culture at the turn of the century. She plans to pursue a Designated Emphasis in Film & Media and continue her research on Weimar film, focusing specifically on the reconstruction of silent film scores.

Biography

Verena Wolf is a Ph.D. candidate of German Studies at the University of California at Berkeley.  She received her Magistra Artium and Erstes Staatsexamen (Master’s of Education) in History, English, and Education from the Goethe University Frankfurt (2016), and her Master of Arts in German Studies from the University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa (2013).  Her Magister thesis Koloniale Völkerschauen in Frankfurt. Die Wahrnehmung des Fremden zwischen Konsum, Politik und Wissenschaft (Colonial ethnological exhibitions in Frankfurt.  Perceptions of the Other in commerce, politics and science) was honored with the Stiftungsfonds Kopper Award.  Before coming to Berkeley, she taught English, German, and History at the Colegio Alemán in Guatemala City and completed her teacher training in Freiburg.  Her general research interests include late 19th – to 21st – century literary cultures, women and gender studies, postcolonial and critical theory, and ecocriticism.

Biography

Qingyang Zhou (Freya) is a graduate student in the Department of German. She joined the program in 2020 after receiving a B.A. in German Studies, Film and Media Studies, and Comparative Literature from the University of Pennsylvania that same year. Originally from Shenzhen, China, Freya is interested in the intersections of German-Asian cultures, particularly as they pertain to the collaborations between the film industries of East/West Germany, China, and North/South Korea during the Cold War and beyond. She has published articles on the experiences of Jewish refugees in Shanghai during WWII, and has presented research on European-Asian Studies at the annual conferences of the Northeast Modern Language Association, the German Studies Association, and the Society for Cinema and Media Studies. She plans on pursuing a Joint Degree in Chinese Studies, with a Designated Emphasis on Film and Media.