I am an Assistant Professor of German at Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota. I grew up in the German Democratic Republic and earned a teaching certification for Secondary Education for German and English from the Otto-von-Guericke-University Magdeburg (Germany) in 2008. I received a Masters in German and a Minor in Linguistics from the Texas Tech University in 2009, and a PhD from the Pennsylvania State University in 2015 with my dissertation "The Concert Hall as Heterotopia: Sounds and Sights of Resistance in the Leipzig Gewandhaus 1970-1989." At Penn State, I received the Harold F. Martin Graduate Assistant Outstanding Teaching Award. In 2020, I was awarded the national Small Undergraduate German Program Special Interest Group Award for Outstanding German Program Development and Advocacy.
I keep spending my research time with questions of artistic expressions of social change, musical engagement with socio-political issues, and the reception history of art in the GDR. My interdisciplinary research focuses on East German music, architecture, and the fine arts during the 1970s and 1980s. I have published on works of the band Rammstein, contemporary HipHop artists, Gustav Mahler, the Gewandhaus in Leipzig, and other topics in, among others, Popular Music and Society, Monatshefte, New German Critique, and Die Unterrichtspraxis/Teaching German. My research has been funded by Penn State, Carleton College, and NEH. I have presented at conferences such as the GSA, ACTFL, NeMLA, and smaller venues. My next project will trace the work of female rock musicians in the GDR. Outside of academia, I enjoy the making of, and listening to, music in all its forms and variations. I used to compete in ballroom and jazz dance and play the piano and saxophone. I worked with the Chelsea Music Festival in New York City under the artistic leadership of Ken-David and Melinda Lee Masur, and volunteered as chair of the Music Committee at a local Fellowship where, among other things, I helped organize three concert series. I was part of the Composition Program at Yamaha and completed the teacher’s education program at Kindermusik International. I won the Anastacia Idol Singing Competition in Stuttgart (Germany), which gave me the chance to sing in front of 15,000 people next to singer Anastacia, and I sang the lead vocal role in a production of High School Musical in my hometown. I have performed with various jazz bands and choirs and sang the American National Anthem at local sports events. I also love being outside (with our dog Layla aka "Ma'am") especially when the sun is shining and temperatures are above freezing. Lately, I have been engrossed in loving our new addition to my family, our daughter. ----- its not down in any map. true places never are herman melville |
things i like in no particular order:
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