Graduate Students

Email: sascha.daniels@duke.edu

Alessandra (Sascha) Daniels (pronouns: they/she) is originally from Washington, D.C. and earned their bachelor’s degree from West Virginia University in World Languages, Literature, and Linguistics with a concentration in German and a minor in Japanese Studies. Daniels is a three-time U.S. State Department alum, having received the Benjamin A. Gilman Scholarship to study abroad in Japan, as well as the Congress Bundestag Youth Exchange (CBYX) scholarship to study in Germany and the Fulbright US Student English Teaching Assistant award to teach in Germany. Their research interests include Afro-German identity, the influence of African diasporic communities on German culture, contemporary Afro-German youth culture, Afro-German film and poetry, German hip-hop, and the transnational connection between the African American and Afro-German diasporas. In 2022, Daniels earned their master’s degree from the University of Texas at Austin, in which they explored how Afro-Germans define their racial identities through African American forms of media. When they aren’t studying, reading, or writing, you can likely find them at the gym, going for walks in nature, or dancing to reggaeton or Afrobeats in their kitchen, likely always accompanied by their cat, Enola.

Tim graduated summa cum laude with Distinction in Literature from Yale University, where he also earned an M.A. in Comparative Literature. He held a Paul Mellon Fellowship at Clare College, University of Cambridge, where he earned an M.Phil. in English with Distinction. He is interested in literary theory and criticism, hermeneutics, psychoanalysis, rhetorical reading, Romanticism, comparative and intertextual approaches to literature, tragedy, the philosophy of dialogue, and lyric poetry. He especially likes to trace the critical history of a text and to synthesize the readings—from the ingenious to the perverse—produced by a text’s major readers. Questions of pedagogy, the ethics of teaching, and injustice in education are also major concerns, issues he confronted when earning his Master of Arts in Teaching (MAT) from Duke. He has studied authors from a range of traditions, including Plato, Racine, Rousseau, Wordsworth, Shelley, Leopardi, and Flaubert, and hopes to add, among others, Goethe, Lessing, Hölderlin, Kleist, Rilke, and Freud to the list in the Carolina-Duke program, which he joined in the Fall of 2020. He looks forward to discovering new interests along the way.

Merlin graduated from Philipps-University of Marburg, where he received his B.A. in European Literatures and his M.A. in German Literature. During his postgraduate studies, he spent an academic year at the University of Kent in Canterbury, UK. In his Bachelor thesis, he examined the concept of ‘negative capability’ in relation to the odes of John Keats. In his Master thesis, he analyzed the novels of Christian Kracht, focusing on his performative and ambiguous self-representation as an author, the question of identity formation of many of the novels’ characters under postmodern conditions, and the rhizomatic intertextual references in his oeuvre to other literary works. His research interests include Romanticism, especially the poetic interplay between subject and nature, Modernism, with a major focus on Critical Theory, particularly the writings of Adorno on socio-cultural and aesthetic subjects, as well as Postmodernism.

Natasza earned her B.A. in English and Psychology at Boston College in 2016. She completed her M.A. in English Literature at Simmons University in 2019, writing her honors thesis on the way cinematic qualities facilitate an exploration of German victimhood in Günter Grass’ Im Krebsgang. After working for several years as an editor for a magazine while attending school, Natasza will be joining the UNC-Duke family in the fall of 2019. Her current research interests include the effect of trauma and war on consciousness and identity formation in 20th Century novels, particularly in work by Heinrich Böll, Thomas Mann, and Christa Wolf. Aside from her literary interests, Natasza enjoys playing violin, weightlifting, and trying a variety of chocolate.

Email: andrea.larson@duke.edu

Born in Munich, Germany, and raised near Garmisch Partenkirchen, Andrea is the published author of three narrative non-fiction books in German. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in Economics from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a MALS from Duke University, and has taught German at both UNC and Duke before joining the PhD program. In her research interest, she focuses on the juxtaposition of language and identity as it is reflected in German literary and philosophical thought, specifically as it pertains to exile literature and female authorship and representation. In her free time, Andrea loves travel, nature and family – ideally all combined.

Email: undraa.lhamsuren@duke.edu

Originally from Mongolia, I have lived in Bonn since I was 14. I received my master’s degree from the University of Bonn in 2011. In my master’s thesis I examined the aspects of loss and death in J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye and compared it to the German classic of adolescence literature Die Neuen Leiden des jungen W. by Ulrich Plenzdorf. From 2012-2016 I have taught elementary to advanced German to adult immigrants, some of whom were refugees. My academic interests include 20th century German postwar literature and culture, contemporary literature, children’s and young adult literature.

Email: iand@live.unc.edu

Ian graduated from Brigham Young University in 2014 with a degree in English and another in German studies. He then had the opportunity to further study at BYU and earned his Master’s in English Literature in 2017. During his studies, and especially his thesis, he found himself drawn to the Romantic and the relationship of narratives across languages, periods, and mediums. Utilizing adaptation theory and the concept of memes, his thesis focused on the evolution of Dracula through film with a particular focus on Murnau’s Nosferatu. He is now interested in expanding his knowledge of German literature and film. Other scholarly interests include music, pop culture, and science. While interested in scholarship, he discovered that his true love is teaching. He spent four years teaching rhetoric and composition at BYU and loved every minute of it. His other great love is writing, which he has been doing avidly since he was ten years old. When he isn’t reading—or writing the next great fantasy novel—Ian enjoys playing the violin, sparring, and playing with his children.

Email: luca.pixner@duke.edu

A native Austrian, Luca got his BA in English at Randolph-Macon College in Ashland, VA. He also took classes in German and French which culminated in his capstone project on concepts of natural queerness in Joris-Karl Huysmans Against Nature. In 2020, he published a co-authored paper in Feminist German Studies titled “The Language of Flowers and the (Re)productive Female Body in Hedwig Dohm’s Werde, die Du bist!” Last year, he completed social service at a “Notschlafstelle” for adolescent drug users in Innsbruck, AUT. Luca is interested in Austrian literature, modernism, literary theory, queer ecology, and contemporary literature. In his free time, he enjoys walking and hiking and making singing videos on Snapchat with his little sister.

Email: wei.quan@duke.edu

Originally from an industrial city in northern China, Wei received his B.A. there in German Studies at Shanxi University in 2016. Subsequently, he studied Germanistik, Popular Culture Studies and Gender Studies at the University of Zurich and graduated in 2020. During the time in Switzerland, he read the Gender thoughts of Judith Butler and Michel Foucault with great passion and then transferred his research interests to varied cultural topics and theories with focus on the Frankfurter School. In his M.A. thesis, he investigated how Americanised mass culture influenced the Halbstarken, a juvenile cultural phenomenon in the post-war Germany, and combined it with Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer and Pierre Bourdieu’s theories. At CDG, he hopes to explore more about conceptual transformation in the Germany of 20th century.

Email: katja.riegler@duke.edu

Katja earned her MA in Film and Media Studies from the University of Vienna in 2006. After earning a second MA in German as a Foreign/Second Language in 2012 (University of Vienna), she worked as a German Language Teacher in Budapest, Moscow, and Vienna. In her time at the Department of Germanic Studies at Trinity College Dublin she taught several undergraduate classes with a focus on Film from the German speaking lands and coming to terms with the past in Austria. Next to her teaching duties, she was the organizer and artistic director of the German speaking student theater which staged Kathrin Röggla´s “Junk Space” in 2018 and Jura Soyfer´s “Der Weltuntergang” in 2019. Her latest talk on Günther Anders for the Douglas Hyde Gallery Dublin reflects another research interest, German Thought in the 20^th century. In her free time, you will find Katja in the nearest cinema or coffeeshop.

Email: joshua.shelly@duke.edu

Joshua began his studies at Wayne State University in Detroit, where he received his BA in German and History in 2011. During his time at Wayne State, he spent the 2009-2010 academic year in Munich. Following his BA, Joshua completed a Master in Library Science (2013) and then a MA in Religious Studies (2015) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. While at Illinois, his interest in German-Jewish studies developed, culminating in work on a 1920’s-era German-language translation of the Hebrew Bible by Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig. Joshua spent this past academic year (2015-2016) in Bonn, Germany where he worked as an English-language teaching assistant in a vocational school as a Fulbright recipient. Joshua’s research interests include: post 1945 Jewish life in German-speaking countries; multilingualism; German-Israeli relations; and memory studies.

Email: dtaichi@live.unc.edu

David earned his BA in Liberal Arts from the Santa Fe campus of St. John’s College in 2015. His work there followed the college’s broad program of study in philosophy, literature, music, and the history of math and science. Following that he lived in both Seattle and Berlin for a year, receiving an MA in Comparative Literature from the University of Washington after finishing his coursework on exchange at the Humboldt-Universität in 2017. He joined the Carolina-Duke Graduate Program in German Studies the following fall. His research interests include idealism, romanticism, and comparative religion

Email: tsarev93@live.unc.edu

Max has a B.A. in German literature from the Humboldt University in Berlin. He is a graduate student in UNC’s department of comparative literature and his dissertation is on Weimar cinema. His research interests lie in critical theory, aesthetics, and urban studies.

Email: lfwilms@live.unc.edu

Leonie is originally from Frankfurt / Main, Germany. After completing a year of voluntary work at an Archaeological Museum, she moved to Tübingen where she received her BA in German Studies with a minor in Rhetoric at Eberhard Karls Universität. In her BA Thesis, she examined the correlation of spaces and metadramatic dimensions in Max Frisch’s play “Biographie: Ein Spiel.” As part of her Master’s program in Literary and Cultural Theory, Leonie came to UNC Chapel Hill as an exchange student and TA in 2016/17. She then successfully applied to join the CDG program. Her research interests include drama, theater and performance as well as spatial theories and narratology.

Email: shiqi.xu553@duke.edu

Born and raised up in Beijing, Shiqi first discovered her interest in German Studies when she was in middle school. She focused her undergraduate study on German and EU politics as well as political philosophy, and earned her bachelor degree in International Politics at Liaoning University in China in 2018. After that, she graduated from the London School of Economics and Political Science with an MSc in European Studies. Her master thesis focused on post-war Germany’s self-understanding in Europe and took a multidisciplinary approach to examine the German Question especially based on Nietzsche’s and Habermas’s thought. Her academic interests involve romanticism, idealism, nationalism and modernism, and she has always been interested in Germany’s ideological role in Europe as well as an ideological rivalry between a “German Europe” and a “French Europe”. In her spare time, Shiqi enjoys travel and musicals, and she loves horses and almost everything in purple.

Email: stephen.zaksewicz@duke.edu

Stephen earned his B.A. in German Studies and in French from Vanderbilt University in 2016. His honors thesis in German studies compared German and French representations of the First World War in novels published by soldiers in the interwar years, focusing especially on criticisms of war and literary refutations of resurging nationalism. After graduation, he worked for two years as an English Teaching Assistant in Linz, Austria through the Fulbright/USTA program. He joined the UNC-Duke family in the fall of 2018. He is interested in artistic movements and influence across art forms, processes of identity formation, and the relationship between the literary and the religious. In his free time, he enjoys hiking and biking, playing the cello and attending concerts, and playing volleyball.

Email: tatjana.zimbeliusklem@duke.edu

A native Austrian, Tatjana received her BA in Comparative Literature and Film from UNC in 2016 after many years of working as a writer and editor. In her senior honors thesis, she examined Arthur Schnitzler’s novella Fräulein Else and Paul Czinner’s filmic adaptation of the text, looking at the ways in which readers and viewers comprehend texts through their senses and how authors and filmmakers use the tools at their disposal to influence such meaning-making. She has long had a special interest in Wiener Moderne and is planning to focus in her doctoral research on the Sprachkrise in literature, the visual and performing arts, and philosophy.