Here you will find information about the speakers who will be presenting in the 25th Biennial Symposium.

Norbert Bachleitner

Bachleitner is a professor of Comparative Literature in the Department of European and Comparative Languages and Literatures at the University of Vienna. His scholarly interests include 18th- to 20th-century relations between English, French, and German literatures, history of literary translation, the modern novel, digital literature, literary theory, especially sociological approaches and intertextuality, book history of the 19th century, and censorship.

 

Kurt Beals

Beals is an associate professor of German and comparative literature at Washington University in St. Louis. His research focuses on experimental movements in 20th-century and contemporary German literature, including Dada, Concrete poetry, and digital poetry. 

Thomas O. Beebee

Beebee is the Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Comparative Literature and German at Pennsylvania State University. His areas of specialization are translation & translation studies, world literature, and empirical studies of literature.

Kit Belgum

Belgum is an associate professor of German at the University of Texas at Austin. She has published in the areas of nineteenth-century German realism, popular culture, periodicals, encyclopedias, geographical literature, and transatlantic cultural transfer.

Tobias Boes

Boes is an associate professor of German at University of Notre Dame. He specializes in the modernist period, the theory and history of the novel, and in cultural interactions between Germany and the world at large.

Vance Byrd

Byrd is an associate professor and department chair of German Studies at Grinnell College. He is a scholar of nineteenth-century German literature who investigates how literary and print culture intersect with the history of visual media. He has published on topics related to the history of books and periodicals, critical race theory, museum studies, environmental humanities, commemoration, and graphic novels.

Sean Franzel

Franzel is an associate professor of German at the University of Missouri-Columbia. His research interests span the literary, intellectual and media history of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Matthias Goeritz

Goeritz is a professor of practice of comparative literature at Washington University in St. Louis. 

Daniela Gretz

Gretz is an assistant professor in the department of German Language and Literature at the University of Cologne. Her areas of expertise and interest include media, in particular 19th-century newspapers and magazines; postcolonial theory and gender studies (intersectionality); ethnology and literature; classical modernity; and the “conservative revolution.”

David D. Kim

Kim is Professor and Vice Chair of Undergraduate Studies in the Department of European Languages and Transcultural Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. His scholarly interests range from postcolonial, global, migration and translation studies and community engagement to human rights, cosmopolitanism, cultural and political theories, global literary histories, and digital humanities.

Caroline Kita

Kita is an associate professor of German and comparative literature at Washington University in St. Louis. Her scholarship focuses on German and Austrian culture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Todd Kontje

Kontje is a professor of German and comparative literature at the University of California, San Diego. His research is focused on questions surrounding national identity in German literature.

Paul Michael Lützeler

Lützeler is the Rosa May Distinguished University Professor in the Humanities and the Director of the Max Kade Center for Contemporary German Literature at Washington University in St. Louis. Lützeler's published works include an award-winning biography of Hermann Broch, three books on the idea of Europe in German and European literature, and seven other books on topics of 19th and 20th century German literature.

B. Venkat Mani

Mani is a professor of German at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Hiss research focuses on 19th- to 21st-century German literature and culture, world literature, translation, migrants and refugees in the German, European, and global contexts, literature and migration, and print- and digital cultural histories.

Lynne Tatlock

Tatlock is the Hortense and Tobias Lewin Distinguished Professor in the Humanities and the Director of the Program in Comparative Literature at Washington University in St. Louis. She has published widely on German literature and culture from 1650 to the 1990s with a concentration in the late seventeenth century and the nineteenth century.

Birgit Tautz

Tautz is the George Taylor Files Professor of Modern Languages at Bowdoin College. She specializes in literature, philosophy, and culture around 1800, the legacy of the 18th century today, and post-1945 visual and cinema studies.

Chunjie Zhang

Zhang is an associate professor of German at University of California, Davis. Her research explores global and transcultural perspectives in the study and teaching of literature, culture, and ideas. She works on the long eighteenth century, global modernisms, Asian-European studies, contemporary refugee literature, and postcolonialism.