Manuela Di Lisa

I moved to Bloomington this August to start my doctorate in German Literature and Culture. I am a German citizen but moved here from the Netherlands where I was living for the past three years. It has been a very long time since I finished my undergrad back in 2011 and I have been teaching German as a Foreign Language for the past ten years.

Brian Hensley

Over the last year, I’m excited to share that I successfully completed my qualifying exams in October 2023. I decided I needed a break before working on my dissertation prospectus, during which time I watched all of Six Feet Under. I successfully defended my dissertation prospectus in April 2024, in which I outlined my future work on nervousness in the fin-de-siecle era of German-speaking Europe. Around that time, I was also presenting my work at the Kentucky Foreign Language Conference at my wonderful alma mater, the University of Kentucky. Go Cats!

I’m also proud to say that over the past year, I have continued to be involved as a departmental organizer in the Indiana Graduate Workers’ Coalition at Indiana University, where we continue to advocate for better working conditions and a living wage for graduate student workers. Within the department, I also continued my service on the Graduate Student Steering Committee as the departmental co-chair along with Lee Czerw.

Over the summer, I traveled to Europe to visit friends in Munich and then to present my research at the Anatomy of a Suffering Soul workshop in Prague. In June, I resided as a visiting researcher at in the beautiful Groningen in the Netherlands, where I spent my time reading old psychiatric handbooks, walking along the canals, riding a bike, and petting street cats.

Cynthia Shin

I was the recipient of Women in German’s Zantop Travel Award for Graduate Student and the CAHI Graduate Capstone Research Award. Both were used towards a trip to Germany and Austria for researching posthuman theater. It was my first time in German theater and I’m grateful for the opportunity. I’d like to thank Teresa Kovacs for introducing me to the world of German theater and encouraging me to pursue this interest.

I also won the DEFA Graduate Student Essay Prize for my paper “Socialist Women amidst the Stars – A Feminist reading of DEFA Space Adventure Trilogy” where I put Alltagsfilme in conversation with science fiction cinema. I was introduced to DEFA films in Ben Robinson’s course on DDR literature, and it’s a rich, fascinating subject.

Finally, I joined the steering committee of Diversity, Decolonization & the German Curriculum (DDGC), a collective dedicated to transnational and transdisciplinary German studies. Our new big initiative this year is the research cooperatives, where scholars with similar interests gather to learn, discuss, and organize outside the structures of academia. My favorite DDGC program though is the reading groups where I inevitably don’t finish the chapter on time.

Craig Stewart

I have submitted an article entitled “Der Tod der Universalgelehrten und die Zukunft mit KI” (The Death of the Polymath and the Future with AI) to the journal Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte (History of Science and Humanities). This article discusses how in the past polymaths were an important part of the development of science – people such as Leibniz and Alexander von Humbolt – but today it is difficult to impossible for one person to contribute significantly to multiple disciplines. Instead, given the capabilities and dangers of AI, what science and society may need most are people who can understand and explain AI applications and the scientific (and other) work they perform so that the dangers of AI may better be harnessed, and its benefits better realized.

Claire Richters

Last winter Claire Richters, a PhD student in the department, got her review of Harvard philosopher Peter Gordon's recent book on Theodor Adorno published in the Hedgehog Review. 

Luke Rylander

I presented the section of my dissertation titled "Fetal Forms and Goethe's Morphology" at this semester's first brown-bag discussion. Relatedly I also presented for the poster session for the Women in German's annual conference. My poster was called "Fetal Stages/Staging the Fetal" and was a "post-mortem" reflection on my dissertation project and the continued legacy of Enlightenment thought on our contemporary discourse on abortion, gender and embryology.

Bradley Weiss

As a first-year PhD student in the department, I am very grateful to be a recipient of a Max Kade fellowship, which is allowing me to focus on my coursework and research interests in a way that I have not previously been able to do. I have been trying to make the most of that opportunity in a number of ways. In addition to my courses at IU, this semester I have been participating in a course on Latin palaeography through the University of Warwick in the UK, which meets weekly over a nine-week period, and which has allowed me to improve my skills at reading medieval manuscripts. In a similar vein, I am also currently participating in a winter school through the Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften (or Austrian Academy of Sciences) on the topic of “Handwritten Text of Medieval Documents,” in which the participants are collaborating to train machine learning models on how to accurately interpret medieval manuscripts. After three biweekly sessions online, the winter school will be capped off with three in-person meetings in Vienna December 18-20th. Prior to that, I will be presenting a paper at the conference “The Fantastic and the Supernatural in the Medieval Germanic Traditions” in Padua, Italy, held on December 11-12th, about the enduring, pre-Christian, pagan elements found in the Old Saxon Hêliand. Finally, I was recently invited to be a presenter at the biannual Old Frisian Summer School, which will be taking place in Groningen, the Netherlands, in summer 2025.