Meet our Graduate Students
Caroline Blount
Carolina-Duke Graduate Student
Caroline's Full Bio
Email: caroline.blount@duke.edu
Caroline earned her B.A. in German and English from the University of South Carolina in 2017. For her Carolina Honors College thesis, she compared James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans and Karl May’s Winnetou I, focusing on both books’ metanarratives and cultural receptions. As an undergraduate, she worked at USC’s Center for Digital Humanities on the “Lone Woman and Last Indians” project which created a digital archive centered around the Lone Woman of San Nicholas Island and Scott O’Dell’s novel Island of the Blue Dolphins, which fictionalizes her life. Before coming to CDG, she spent a year as an English Teaching Assistant in Lower Bavaria through the Fulbright Program. She is interested in German-American relations, regional identities, political theory, and the cultural history of literature. Outside of her studies, she enjoys traveling, playing piano, and searching for the South’s best Mac & Cheese.
Kasturi Chatterjee
Carolina-Duke Graduate Student
Kasturi's Full Bio
Email: kasturi.chatterjee@duke.edu
Kasturi earned their bachelor’s degree with a triple major in Economics, Political Science, and Sociology in 2015. They went on to earn an MA in Sociology in 2017 and another in German Studies in 2022 with a focus on media, film and translation studies. Coming to German Studies via an interest in critical theory, literary translation and film studies, for their MA dissertation, they examined the influence of American Hip Hop in the 21st century Deutschrap industry.The focus of the study was on the various minoritarian expressions of transcultural and translingual agency by artist collectives. The aim was to look at alternative forms of political agency articulated by bodies marked as Outsiders by German civil society. Kasturi’s current research interests lie in the areas of Black German Studies, Afropean literature, film studies, Zombie Ideology and philosophy. When not in the library, they are busy cooking desi food, brewing South Indian drip coffee or drawing cartoons to amuse their friends.
Sascha Daniels
Carolina-Duke Graduate Student
Sascha's Full Bio
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.
Nathan Drapela
Carolina-Duke Graduate Student
Nathan's Full Bio
Email:
nathan.drapela@duke.edu
Nathan received his B.A. in philosophy from Western Washington University in 2014. After spending two years in Bregenz, Austria as an English teaching assistant, he joined the Carolina-Duke Program in 2017. Nathan’s research focuses on narrative prose from the 19th and 20th centuries, with a particular interest in realism and modernism. His dissertation considers the untimeliness of walking in modernity and its implications for narrative, memory, subject formation, and understanding of space and time through analyses of narrative works by Adalbert Stifter, Rainer Maria Rilke, Robert Walser, and W.G. Sebald. Nathan has also published articles on Johann Wilhelm Ritter, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Hermann Hesse.
Tim Ellison
Carolina-Duke Graduate Student
Tim's Full Bio
Email:
tim.ellison@duke.edu
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 Ganzevoort
Carolina-Duke Graduate Student
Merlin's Full Bio
Email:
mg525@duke.edu
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 Gawlick
Carolina-Duke Graduate Student
Natasza's Full Bio
Email:
natasza.gawlick@duke.edu
Natasza Gawlick is a fifth year PhD student in the Carolina-Duke Joint Graduate Program in German Studies. Her current research interests focus on identity and belonging in Sinti and Roma literature, theater and film of the 21st century. Natasza’s dissertation explores the way each above-mentioned genre facilitates the creation of non-territorial communities through their distinct formal and structural elements, as well as their theoretical commitments to queer studies, intersectional feminism, and Critical Race Theory. She is particularly interested in exploring the role of kinship, archives of memory and changing notions of citizenship that are articulated through and vis a vis cultural products. Natasza serves on the editorial collective at the DDGC (Diversity, Decolonization and the German Curriculum) Blog and is interested the role that digital humanities and virtual spaces (such as websites, forums, etc.) can play in creating a sense of community.
Jessica Ginocchio
Comparative Literature Graduate Student
Jessica's Full Bio
Email:
jessgino@live.unc.edu
Jessica is a PhD candidate in the Department of English and Comparative Literature, who regularly teaches Russian in GSLL. Jessica is a proud product of UNC’s Russian program, graduating with her B.A. in 2011 and M.A. in 2013. She also earned her Master’s in Teaching from Duke University in 2015. Now, her research focuses on late 19th and early 20th century Russian and German fiction Her dissertation explores representations of animal consciousness in the works of Russian fiction across several time periods, from Lev Tolstoy to Victor Pelevin. She has been studying Russian since 2007 and has studied in St. Petersburg, Moscow, and Kiev. She has taught Russian language courses and served as a teaching assistant for Russian and German culture courses in the Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literatures, as well as ENGL 105 in the First Year Writing Program. Besides reading, writing, and studying languages, she enjoys hiking, practicing yoga, and volunteering in animal rescue.
Andreas König
Carolina-Duke Graduate Student
Andreas' Full Bio
Email: akonig@unc.edu
Andreas König is our CDG exchange student from Switzerland. He earned his B.A. in German Studies from the University of Zurich in 2022 with a minor in Philosophy. In his bachelor thesis, he focused on the connection between character agency and rhetoric capacities in Goethe’s Faust I, which was awarded two prizes. After finishing his bachelor’s degree, he spent half a year as a graduate exchange student in the Netherlands at Leiden University. He looks forward to broadening his horizon by working as a teaching assistant in North Carolina. Outside of his studies, he enjoys hiking, visiting museums, and putting his Dutch to the test.
Andrea Larson
Carolina-Duke Graduate Student
Andrea's Full Bio
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.
Ameliah Leonhardt
Carolina-Duke Graduate Student
Ameliah's Full Bio
Email: ameliah.leonhardt@duke.edu
Ameliah earned her B.A. in English for Secondary Teachers at Western Kentucky University in 2013. For her honors undergraduate thesis, she explored images of Jewish identity in literature from the Second Temple period. After teaching English abroad and at American secondary schools, her interest in Jewish Studies led her to Duke University, where she earned her M.A. in Religious Studies in 2019. She joined the Carolina-Duke program in 2020. She is primarily concerned with German and Austrian Jewish literature from the nineteenth and early twentieth century. All aspects of her research concern elements of Jewish identity as a nexus for broader European issues of modernism and gender/sexuality. She is also interested in tracing similar themes of Jewish identity in secular and religious Jewish writers, and specifically how female Jewish writers have adapted elements of the Hebrew Bible for modern audiences.
Joseph Lund
Carolina-Duke Graduate Student
Joseph's Full Bio
Email: joseph.lund@duke.edu
Joseph earned his B.A. in German Studies at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities in 2019. While there he served as Team Leader in the Language Center and eventually received the AATG Minnesota Undergraduate Student of the Year Award after working with faculty members to complete his senior capstone project, an analysis of the historiographical poetics of Ingeborg Bachmann’s Malina and its embedded fairytale. Joseph’s research explores the emergence of misanthropy in postwar German literature. His dissertation examines novels and films that stage the misanthrope’s fantasy of social self-extraction, most often by means of secluded or hidden places like deserts, islands, and abandoned buildings. Despite his interest in recluse curmudgeons and cynics, Joseph very happily spends time with friends and strangers at local pool halls and music events.
Ian McArthur
Carolina-Duke Graduate Student
Ian's Full Bio
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.
Maya von und zur Mühlen
Carolina-Duke Graduate Student
Maya's Full Bio
Email: maya.vonundzurmuhlen@duke.edu
After growing up in Alsace, France, Maya earned her BA in English at King’s College London. During her BA, she spent a semester studying abroad at UC Berkeley, where she majored in Philosophy. She then went on to study French and German literature at the University of Cambridge, earning an MPhil, before concentrating on German and Comparative Literature at the University of Bonn and the University of St Andrews where she earned a joint MA/MLitt. Her research centers around the long 19th century, with a particular emphasis on the Sattelzeit, and is at the intersection of historical discourse, ecocriticism, affect studies and memory studies. She is a James B. Duke Fellow. Outside of her studies and research, she enjoys writing prose, making collages for her friends and family, practicing yoga and swimming.
Kajal Mukhopadhyay
Carolina-Duke Graduate Student
Kajal's Full Bio
Email: kajal.mukhopadhyay@duke.edu
Kajal completed B.A. and M.A. in German Studies from JNU, India. His M.Phil. dissertation focused on representations of trauma in German literature of the post-Wende period. Kajal’s recent interests include cultural trauma studies, studies of caste, race, politics of discrimination and exclusion with particular reference to marginalized sections of Indian and German societies. His research hopes to explore how experiences of trauma are often rooted in the socio-cultural construction of identity of minorities and how ideological constructs such as race and caste function as determining factors of their exclusion from discourse of nation-building. Additional interests include literary economics and film studies.
Elena Petron
Carolina-Duke Graduate Student
Elena's Full Bio
Email: elena.petron@duke.edu
Raised in Connecticut, Elena earned her B.A. in German Studies and English Literature from Kenyon College in 2022. For her senior thesis, she explored perceptions of individuality and the acquisition of self-knowledge in Hesse’s Steppenwolf by applying Jungian psychoanalysis as a rhetorical lens. Before coming to CDG, and as inspired by her work as a TA of German at Kenyon, Elena went to Vienna, Austria for a year as an English Teaching Assistant through Fulbright Austria.
Elena is interested in notions of Heimat, perceptions of self, and the relevance of psychoanalytic theory in understanding Exilliteratur of the 20th century. Outside of her studies, she enjoys distance running, hiking and photography.
Zora Piskačová
History Graduate Student
Zora's Full Bio
Email: zora.piskacova@unc.edu
Originally from Prague, Czech Republic, Zora has earned her B.A. in History with a minor in Germanic Studies from Franklin University, Switzerland in 2017. Subsequently, she spent two years in Munich, Germany, perusing an M.A. in East European Studies at the Ludwig Maximilian University before moving to United States in 2019 to start her PhD in History at UNC Chapel Hill. She is primarily interested in social, political, and urban history of interwar period Central Europe. Her dissertation focuses on the divided city of Teschen, exploring the ways in which municipal administrators responded to border-induced challenges following the First World War. She has joined the GSLL Department in Fall 2023 as Czech language instructor and is thoroughly enjoying teaching her complicated yet beautiful language to Carolina students! In her free time, you’ll find Zora hiking in the woods or getting spiritually lost in various fantasy and sci-fi universes.
Luca Pixner
Carolina-Duke Graduate Student
Luca's Full Bio
Email: luca.pixner@duke.edu
Originally from Austria, Luca got his BA in English at Randolph-Macon College in Ashland, VA. 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!” Before coming to CDG, he completed community service at a “Notschlafstelle” for adult drug users in Innsbruck, AUT. The past two summers, Luca served as the graduate assistant for the Duke in Berlin summer program. He is working mostly on postwar Austrian literature and more broadly interested in the twentieth century, gender and queer theory, and architecture and spatiality. He also enjoys walking, hiking, and singing.
Wei Quan
Carolina-Duke Graduate Student
Wei's Full Bio
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.
Katja Riegler
Carolina-Duke Graduate Student
Katja's Full Bio
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 20th century. In her free time, you will find Katja in the nearest cinema or coffeeshop.
Theresa Sambruno-Spannhoff
Carolina-Duke Graduate Student
Theresa's Full Bio
Email: tsambruno-spannhoff@unc.edu
Theresa earned her interdisciplinary bachelor’s degree in German Studies and Political Science from the Leibniz Universität Hannover in 2018, where she also completed her Master of Education in German and Politics and her MA in Modern German Literature with honors in 2021. As an ERASMUS student, she studied Political Science at the Universidade dos Açores in Portugal in 2017. In 2019, she spent two semesters at Washington University in St. Louis as a Research Assistant in the German Department. She dedicated her master’s thesis to the exploration of a Critical Whiteness approach on German and Austrian plays about the Haitian Revolution around 1800. Her research interests include mythology in modern literature, gender and sexuality, Critical Race Theory, modern and contemporary German poetry, German cinema, and Ecocriticism. She joined the Carolina-Duke Graduate Program in German Studies in the fall of 2021.
David ‘Tako’ Takamura
Carolina-Duke Graduate Student
David's Full Bio
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
Syed Habeeb Tehseen
Carolina-Duke Graduate Student
Syed's Full Bio
Email: habeeb.tehseen@duke.edu
Habeeb earned his BA in German from Delhi University (first year) and Jawaharlal Nehru University, India in 2020. He earned his MA in German Literature from Jawaharlal Nehru University, India in 2022 and his Master thesis focused on the motif of borders in Burhan Qurbani’s Berlin Alexanderplatz (2020). He is a U.S. State Department Exchange alum, having taken part in the Study of U.S. Institutes (SUSI-2019) program at the Dialogue Institute, Temple University, Philadelphia. He also received a DAAD-HSK Summer School Scholarship (2019) for the course “Berlin Pur: Sprache lernen – Landeskunde erleben ” at the Free University of Berlin. His current interests include contemporary German literature and cinema and intercultural literary theory. Outside of his studies he enjoys reading literature, writing poetry and going to the cinema.
Jasmin Wagner
Carolina-Duke Graduate Student
Jasmin's Full Bio
Email: jasmin.wagner@duke.edu
Jasmin earned her B.A. and M.Ed. in teaching German and English at the University of Cologne, Germany. Discovering her love for teaching at an early age, she has taught German and English to elementary and high school students in Germany over the course of ten years. Her bachelor’s thesis focused on Schiller’s educational thinking in recourse to Kant. In her master’s thesis, she examined connections in the educational thinking of Friedrich Nietzsche and the New Humanists. She studied abroad at Ege University, Izmir, Turkey, in 2015 to discover Turkey not only as her heritage but in pursuance of educational interests. She then taught German and studied Arabic and English literature at Allegheny College in the academic year 2016/17. During her master’s degree in 2020, she studied German and English language and literature at Aristotle University in Thessaloniki, Greece, to increase her first-hand knowledge in German-Greek and Turkish-Greek relations. Receiving a DAAD scholarship in 2021 allowed her to teach German at UNC Charlotte for two consecutive years. Her current interests include Turkish-German literature and film, educational philosophy, and ancient modern relations.
Leonie Wilms
Carolina-Duke Graduate Student
Leonie's Full Bio
Email: lfwilms@live.unc.edu
Leonie earned her B.A. in German Studies with a minor in Rhetoric from the University of Tübingen. She first came to UNC as an exchange student in 2016 and joined the CDG program the following year. Her research focuses on the aesthetic politics of strong negative emotions in drama and theater of the 20th and 21st century. Her dissertation examines anger and compassion in Bertolt Brecht’s epic theater; hate, media, and violence in plays by Elfriede Jelinek and Milo Rau; and female and queer rage and revenge in plays by Sivan Ben Yishai and Ewald Palmetshofer. Leonie is a recipient of the Dissertation Completion Fellowship awarded by the UNC Graduate School for the academic year 2023/24. An article on Bertolt Brecht in Monatshefte is forthcoming.
Shiqi Xu
Carolina-Duke Graduate Student
Shiqi's Full Bio
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.
Stephen Zaksewicz
Carolina-Duke Graduate Student
Stephen's Full Bio
Email: stephen.zaksewicz@duke.edu
Stephen’s dissertation examines the relationship between conceptions of nature and models of worldhood in contemporary Austrian prose. Against a history of nature writing and the cultural and political significance of nature in the Austrian contexts, he considers how contemporary novels reimagine nature and humanity’s relationship to it. He situates this reimagining within theoretical discourses both on the Anthropocene, in its epistemological, ontological, and aesthetic challenges to humanity’s understanding of its role and place in the contemporary, global world, and on “planetarity,” where the “planet” emerges as an alternative figure of worldhood against the “globe” of globalization.
In general, Stephen is an austrophile, having spent two years as an English Teaching Assistant in Linz and a year conducting dissertation research in Vienna through Fulbright Austria. He is most likely to be found hiking a mountain, at the opera, playing volleyball, at his cello, or hunched over a board game.
Tatjana Zimbelius-Klem
Carolina-Duke Graduate Student
Tatjana's Full Bio
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.
Her dissertation scrutinizes the role of music in the public sphere in Interwar Austria, specifically examining what types of communities were created through and organized around musical events.
