Graduate Students 2007-2008

David Andersen received his BA in German from Davidson College in 2006. He spent his junior year studying in Würzburg, and there became interested in drama and literary history. Prior to graduating Davidson, David wrote his senior thesis on the influence of Brecht on the dramas of Peter Weiss. His other interests include technical theatre and the political influence of popular music. He is a member of the Davidson College Chapter of Delta Phi Alpha.
danderse@email.unc.edu

Rick Apgar graduated from Davidson College with a B.A. in German. He began his studies at UNC in 2001 and completed his M.A. in 2003 with a thesis entitled "Domestic Realities: Pedagogy and Principles of National Improvement in Robinson der Juengere and the Deutsches Museum." He is currently in Mannheim on the UNC-Chapel Hill/Baden Wuerttemburg TA exchange program where he is teaching English and conducting dissertation research. His research interests include travel literature, pedagogical/didactic texts and anything written prior to mid-July 1794.
apgar@email.unc.edu

Richard Benson earned his BA in German magna cum laude from New York University in 1999. As an undergraduate he spent a semester as an exchange student at the Humboldt Universität zu Berlin. In the fall of 2003, Richard entered the program in German Literature at UNC and received a Joseph E. Pogue Fellowship. After completing his thesis on Jakob Wassermann’s novel, Die Juden von Zirndorf, he received his MA degree in the spring of 2005. During the following year, he continued to cultivate an unhealthy interest in the Bildungsroman genre, and at the Kentucky Foreign Language Conference he presented a paper entitled, “Clowning around with Goethe: Karl Emil Franzos’ Der Pojaz and the Critique of Normative Identity in the Bildungsroman.” In the academic year 2006-2007 he participated in the UNC-CH/Baden-Württemberg TA exchange program at the Universität Mannheim, where he taught English and began writing his dissertation on identity, cultural memory, and the reinvention of German-Jewish tradition in fin-de-siècle German and Austrian culture.
rbenson@email.unc.edu

Jennifer Bienert earned her B.A. equivalent in English linguistics, American Studies and Neuere deutsche Literaturgeschichte from the Julius-Maximilians-Universität in Würzburg, Germany. She spent the 2005-2006 academic year at Davidson College, where she developed her interest in teaching German to college students while working as an assistant teacher. In her free time, she enjoys traveling and learning/speaking foreign languages including French, Spanish and Japanese. Her current research interests include Kästner, Brecht and modern drama.
jbienert@email.unc.edu

Robert Blankenship graduated with a BA in German and International Studies from the University of Southern Mississippi in 2003 and with an MA in German from Bowling Green State University in 2005 with a thesis on memorialization and melancholy in Günter Grass’s Unkenrufe and Stefan Heym’s Pargfrider. He has also studied at the universities of Bonn (2001-2002) and Salzburg (2003-2004). Bobby’s current research interests include East German literature, in particular the works of Christoph Hein, and the themes of utopia, dissent, and alcohol consumption in the GDR. Most recently, Bobby has been interested in the evolution of the trope of suicide in GDR literature.
blanken@email.unc.edu

Sara Budarz graduated from Purdue University with a dual B.A. in German and Communication Studies in 2003. While at Purdue, she conducted research on social support and methods of coping and published findings in Human Communication Research, 30:42-70 (2004). She also spent a term abroad, studying at Oxford University, Oriel College – a truly magnificent experience. Following graduation, she indulged her wanderlust, spending time lounging in Strasbourg, working at a café in Heidelberg, and most recently, exploring life in the corporate world in Iowa. Her research interests focus on cultural studies, specifically the relationship of religion to sexuality and health across varying cultures.
budarz@email.unc.edu

Rebeccah Dawson received a B.A. in German from Davidson College in 2003. She spent the 2001-2002 academic year studying at the Julius-Maximilians Universität in Würzburg. Bess entered the MA program in Germanic Literature at UNC in Fall 2004 and received her Masters degree in Spring 2006 with her MA Thesis titled "The Brothers Grimm and the Pedagogy of Punishment: "Rapunzel," "Rumpelstilzchen," and Other Tales." Following the 2006-2007 academic year she spent in Mannheim on the UNC-Chapel Hill/Baden Württemburg TA exchange program, Bess was able to spend the summer of 2007 studying Swedish in Uppsala through a generous FLAS Grant. Bess is now concentrating on her studies on soccer in 20th century German literature.
bess@email.unc.edu

Kevin Eubanks received a B.A. in English and German in 1994 and an M.A. in English in 1998 from the University of Nebraska - Lincoln. After several years of subsequent graduate study at Duke University, where his academic focus was Russian language study and critical theory and philosophy in the German intellectual tradition, he joined the Department of English and Comparative Literature at UNC in Fall 2004.
Broadly defined, his areas of academic interest include critical theory and cultural studies, literary and philosophical modernism, as well as contemporary film and popular music and culture. Kevin's current research traces points of intersection across national modernism(s) between theories of time and theories of tragedy, and his dissertation focuses explicitly on the congruence of these themes in the works of Thomas Mann and Martin Heidegger.
keubanks@email.unc.edu

Kirkland "Alex" Fulk received his B.A. in History and German from the University of Texas at Austin in 2005. There, as a Normandy Scholar, he traveled to France and Germany to study WWII and later studied in Würzburg as a participant in a language program. At the University of Texas, Alex was a member of the Phi Alpha Theta national history society and worked for the German department as a translator/transcriber for the Texas German Dialect Project. Alex graduated with honors in history after writing an undergraduate thesis titled “Print Media and the West German Student Movement 1967-1968.” His interests include post-WWII youth and pop culture with an emphasis on the student movement as well as German film.
kafulk@email.unc.edu

Susanne Gomoluch received her M.A. in English Literature, Pedagogy and German Linguistics from Ruhr Universität Bochum in 2005. She was a lecturer of English at RUB and she taught German, English and Polish at Ruhrgebiet-based language schools and companies. Her fields of interest are healing metaphors, literary theory, cultural studies with a focus on Polish-German relationships, and applied linguistics. At Chapel Hill she is working towards her M.A. in German Literature and Linguistics and she is teaching elementary German classes.
susannegomoluch@yahoo.de

Shelley Hay received a BA in Philosophy and German Literature with High Distinction from the University of Virginia in 2002. She wrote her Honors Thesis on the relationship between music and literature in Goethe's “Faust” and Gounod's opera by the same name. She began the MA program in German Literature at UNC in the Fall of 2003 and received her Masters degree Spring 2005. Her MA Thesis titled “The musical language of the world: Absolute truth in Schopenhauer and Novalis” keeps with her general interest regarding the relationship between music and literature. Her current research interests also include theories of translation, the literature of Thomas Mann, German Romanticism, and philosophy of language.
slhay@email.unc.edu

April Henry received her BA in German and Sociology from Indiana University Bloomington in 1999. She began her graduate studies at UNC in 2001. During the academic year 2002-2003 she participated in the UNC-CH/Baden-Wuettemberg TA exchange program at the University of Mannheim. In 2004 she completed her MA thesis titled: “The lament as a Path to Female Subjectivity” for which she received the Ria Stambaugh award. She spent the 2005-2006 academic year in Berlin as a Fulbright scholar conducting research on her dissertation on lamentations in twelfth-and-thirteenth century medieval texts. Her conference papers include: “The Lament as a Path to Partial Subjectivity in Hartmann von Aue’s Erec” and “ The Threat of a Lamenting Female Subject in das Nibelungenlied“. She will be presenting “Restoring the Female Lament in div Chlage” in May 2007 at Medieval Congress in Kalamazoo Michigan for which she won the Sydney M Johnson Award. Her research interests include feminist theory, gender, melancholy, film, and medieval literature.
aphenry@email.unc.edu

Christina Rosemeier Humphrey received her BA in International Studies and French from Muhlenberg College in 1990. She spent her junior year in Paris at Middlebury College School in France and the Université de Paris, Sciences Po. In 1991 she earned her MA in Liberal Studies from New York University, where she focused on International Studies and Eastern European Literature. Following graduation she joined Commerzbank AG New York and worked in international banking for ten years. In 2001 she moved to Charlotte with her husband and two children where she taught German to elementary students for five years. In 2005 she began pursuing her Masters Degree in Teaching Foreign Language: German at UNC Charlotte and entered the program at UNC last year. She is currently working on children’s literature in the Middle Ages and 19th century.
crosehum@email.unc.edu

Silia Kaplan received a B.A. in Psychology from the University of Virginia. She spent a year studying at the University of Tüebingen where she explored her interest in 19^th century German poetry and became reacquainted with the city in which she was born. She is currently working towards an M.A. degree. Her interests are very broad ranging from 18^th and 19^th century literature to film studies.
silia.kaplan@gmail.com

Toby Mag earned his B.A. cum laude in Mathematical Economics and with honors in German in 2005 from Wake Forest University. He completed his M.A. here at Chapel Hill in 2007 with a thesis entitled "From Machines to Screens: The Flattening Effect in Christian Kracht’s Faserland." His research interests at the moment are postmodern literature and philosophy and also film theory. He will be in Tübingen from Fall 2007- Summer 2008 on a Chapel-Hill/Baden-Württemberg grant.
mag@email.unc.edu

Maggie Maurer holds a B.A. in German from UNC-Greensboro and an M.F.A. in fiction writing from the Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. In the spring of 2007 she completed her M.A. thesis, entitled “waz sol doch si nû rîten?—Feminine Spaces and Subjectivity in Hartmann’s Erec” for which she received the Ria Stambaugh award. Her scholarly interests center around the ways in which the uses of ekphrasis and physical space in Middle High German texts contribute to an understanding of the medieval subject. She is interested primarily in romances and courtly culture, but she enjoys learning about all aspects of the Middle Ages, including oral narrative culture, manuscripts, and political, psychological, and religious history. She is currently completing her Ph.D. coursework and looking forward to spending more time in Germany.
mamaurer@email.unc.edu

Samantha Riley received her first BA with honors in Comparative Literature with emphasis in French, German, and Film studies from the University of Iowa in 2000. She earned two additional BA degrees from The Albert-Ludwigs Universität at Freiburg, Germany in German Literature and Linguistics and in English literature and Linguistics, with emphasis on German and American Romanticism, modern linguistics, and the history of language. Her research interests include English, American, German, and French literature of the 18th-21st centuries, Romanticism, film theory, post-modernist literary theory, queer theory, sexuality and gender studies, philosophy, and psychoanalysis.
smriley@email.unc.edu

Elizabeth Schreiber-Byers received her BA in German Studies and International Relations from Scripps College 1998.  She spent her junior year studying at the University of Heidelberg and researching her senior thesis on reconstruction as a representation of national identity in Germany.  Following graduation, she worked for six years as a Web technology specialist for the US government, and 2 years at the German Embassy in Washington, DC.  Her research interests include representations of power in German literature – particularly focused on 19^th and 20^th century literature.
easbyers@email.unc.edu

Cyrus Shahan earned a BS in Biology with a minor in German from Virginia Tech in 1999. He began his graduate studies at UNC in the spring of 2002 and earned a MA with a thesis on German Expressionism in Georg Kaiser’s Nebeneinander and Ernst Toller’s Hoppla, wir leben!. He ditched writing his master’s thesis for a night to go to a punk show (Anti-Flag, fyi) and was struck by the similarities between punk and Expressionist Literature. He immediately went home and began searching for punk in German literature. Thus on Tuesday 12 March 2004 at 1:42am his dissertation project, permanently-temporarily titled “A Poetics of Punk and West German Literature of the 1980s” was born. He will present on New Wave aesthetics and transnational resistance in Thomas Meinecke’s short fiction at the 2007 GSA conference, and has presented on the body in Rainald Goetz’ Irre and decadent fetishism in Ulrike Ottinger’s film Johanna d’Arc of Mongolia. He spent the 2006-2007 academic year in Berlin as a Fulbright scholar where he met with scholars and authors in between buying LPs at flea markets.
shahan@email.unc.edu

Tom Spencer** received a B.A. in Comparative Literature with emphasis in German and Italian from Brigham Young University in 2000, and an M.A. in Comparative Literature from UNC-Chapel Hill in 2003. His main research interests are British and German romanticism. His master's thesis investigates the influence of post-revolutionary history on romantic lyrical conventions in Heine and Byron. He works in German, English, French, and Italian, and spent two years in southern Italy as a missionary. He likes to arrange choral music. He is writing his dissertation on the problem of the divine in romantic thought, focusing specifically on the work of Friedrich Hölderlin and Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
tspencer@email.unc.edu

William Taylor** received a BA cum laude in Integrated Studies with emphases in Philosophy and English from Utah Valley State College. Through a reading of the Oresteia, his senior thesis offered a critique of Freud’s Oedipus complex. He began graduate studies in Comparative Literature at Carolina in 2004. His MA thesis (2007) compared Nietzsche's Ueber die Zunkunft unserer Bildungsanstalten and Plato's Republic in order to draw out Nietzsche's dependence on and variance with Platonism and to understand what value Nietzsche places on the study of the Greeks. William has a couple more years of reading in German Hellenism and classical thought before he begins a dissertation that will continue his research into the Germans' uses and abuses of antiquity in the formation of their aesthetic and ethical notions.
zoso@email.unc.edu

Kai Werbeck earned his MA in Cultural Studies and German Linguistics from Ruhr-University Bochum, Germany in 2005 with a thesis entitled “Der Wandel von Klassen-Stereotypen und assoziierten Vorurteilen in der englischen Fußball-Kultur der letzten Jahrzehnte“. In 2006 he received an additional certificate in DaF (Deutsch als Fremdsprache/Teaching German as a Foreign Language). He likes fantasy novels, horror movies, and soccer. His further areas of interest include cultural theory on popular culture, the (de-)construction of stereotypes, the pit- and downfalls of nationalism, film theory, and very recently, a certain notion of nostalgia found in video games. He is currently teaching Intermediate German and working towards his German language and literature MA degree.
werbeck@email.unc.edu

Stefanie Wollwinder is a Tuebingen exchange student participating in the UNC-CH/Baden-Wuerttemberg TA exchange program. She has been studying at the University of Stuttgart for 3 years before she decided to do her graduate studies at the University of Tuebingen. She is now preparing for her “Magister Artium” degree which she plans to finish after she returns to Tuebingen in 2008. Her literary interest is German literature dealing with 9/11 (which will be the thesis of her “Magisterarbeit”) and German literature of the 19th and 20th century. wollwind@email.unc.edu

**Students enrolled in the Curriculum of Comparative Literature, who teach in the Department of Germanic Languages.