Ambika Athreya (she/sie/ella) joined the Phd program in German Studies in 2021. She works in translation and migration studies, the history of science, and, broadly speaking, transnational German Studies, as it intersects with Latin American and South Asian Studies. She enjoys teaching language classes in both German and Spanish, and loves translating (and thinking about translation). Prior to joining Berkeley, she received an MA in Economics from the University of Arizona.
Andrew Blough is a graduate student in the German Literature and Culture program. He joined the department in 2019 after receiving an M.A. in Philosophy from Duquesne University that same year. He is interested in the interrelation of mediality and knowledge construction, particularly as they pertain to historical interpretation and the construction of political spaces and temporalities. This includes the relation of science, technology, and political thought; legal dramas; and translation theory. He plans on pursuing the critical theory Designated Emphasis. He has also worked as a...
Anna Lynn Dolman is a second-year Ph.D. candidate in the Department of German who plans to pursue Designated Emphases in Dutch Studies and Gender & Women’s Studies. Before coming to Berkeley she received her B.A. in Deutsche Sprache und Literatur and English Studies from the University of Cologne, and her M.A. in Germanic Languages and Literatures from Washington University at St. Louis. Her major research interests include late 18th- to 20th-century German literature, psychoanalysis, exile literature, women’s and gender studies, translation theory and practice, poetry and...
Francesco Fritz joins the PhD program in German Studies in the Fall of 2025. His research interests stretch across the medical humanities, new media, translation studies, and critical theory. His work draws on his literary studies, his clinical work as a medical doctor for the Berlin AIDS Foundation, and fieldwork in Latin America, where he investigated the provision of psychiatric care and the mental health of incarcerated populations. At Berkeley, he aims to connect multilingual narratives of illness with new media forms, examining how shifting textual landscapes shape literary...
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.
Sean Lambert is a PhD candidate in the German department, with a Designated Emphasis in Film and Media Studies. His research focuses on modernity, technology and everyday experience. He is co-managing editor of TRANSIT, UC Berkeley’s graduate student journal of migration studies in the German-speaking world. He is also the co-organizer of the interdisciplinary Townsend Center working groups on the Emergence of German Modernity (which collaborates with members from Tübingen, Harvard and Vienna), and (formerly) the working group on Fear, Horror and Anxiety. His academic writing has...
Louise Curtis is a PhD student in the Department of German. Her interests lie in contemporary literature, autofiction, and digital/new media, as well as the intellectual history of gender. She also works in environmental humanities and is interested in the imagination of coastal zones in German thought and media.
Louise received her B.A. in History from UC Berkeley and her M.A. in German Literature from the University of Greifswald. She has also studied and worked in Strasbourg and Berlin.
Linus Mao joined the Department of German in 2023 after receiving their B.A. in College of Letters (Comparative Literature) and German Studies from Wesleyan University. Their research interests center around twentieth century and contemporary German literature and film, with a theoretical focus on Marxist aesthetic theory, the Frankfurt School critical theory, psychoanalysis, and narrative theory. Particularly, they are interested in the works of director Rainer Werner Fassbinder and writer W.G. Sebald. They plan on pursuing Designated Emphases in Critical Theory and Film and Media...
Marie Jensen is a PhD student in the Department of German, with plans to pursue a Designated Emphasis in Jewish Studies. Her research interests include Asian German studies, sociolinguistics, pedagogy and second language acquisition, Holocaust and memory studies, and critical theory.
Before coming to Berkeley, Marie earned a BA in Germanic Languages and Literatures and English, a minor in Jewish Studies, and an MA in Germanic Languages and Literatures with PK-12 teaching licensure from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. She was a FLAS Fellow for Mandarin...
Olivia Poppe (MA) is a graduate student in the German Department at the University of Berkeley, starting in Fall 2025. Previously, she was a university assistant at the chair of Cultural History of Audiovisual Media in the Department of Theatre, Film, and Media Studies, and enrolled in a Ph.D. program at the Doctoral School of Philological and Cultural Studies at the University of Vienna.
In Berkeley, Olivia will explore concepts of 'haunting' and 'spectrality' as theoretical approaches to understanding social and material precarity in its affective expressions. Furthermore, she...
