Department of Germanic Studies

Andrew Mills (Ph.D.,’09) reports in from the University of Michigan:

“In the time since I last wrote in 2016, I successfully requested to be released from my academic advising duties, to enable me to dedicate all of my time to teaching and mentoring students. The results are fulfilling. For me. It’s unclear how the University of Michigan student body feels about the development. I’ve reorganized and taught our department’s largest course, a 120-student lecture on German fairy tales, on two occasions. The experience has forcibly extinguished any fear of public speaking, or tripping on stages in front of crowds of students holding cell phones. My German honeybee and beekeeping course has flourished, and has become a magnet for students in environmental studies, the natural sciences, and for anyone who wishes to overcome a fear of stinging, winged insects. I have consolidated my faculty-advisor iron rule over the UM student beekeeping club, which has resulted in our first-ever shed-raising, a brandnew apiary location, and the regular occurrence that 20-30 young people sign up for beekeeping whenever we announce trips to the bee yard. Most recently, an undergraduate from my advanced translation workshop and I completed a project that consisted of translating the personal letters of three brothers of a Germanborn UM Professor Emeritus, all of whom died fighting in World War II on the German side. The correspondence consists of the surviving letters that were sent home to family members in Heidelberg from the front lines on the Eastern, Western, and Italian fronts. After all this success, I naturally fell victim to extreme hubris, and attempted to found yet another endlessly successful student organization, the University of Michigan Frakturschriftliteraturlesegruppe, dedicated to the enthusiastic study and enjoyment of extremely dusty, disintegrating German novels printed in Fraktur. Suffering under the psychological burden of a shockingly low level of student interest, the book club subsequently squandered its departmental budget on uneaten pizza, and my aspirations for cementing my legacy in Ann Arbor quickly collapsed into a heap of ruins, the ashes of which are still, from time to time, kicked at scornfully by passersby.”