Gizem Arslan is Lecturer of German at Southern Methodist University, where she specializes in literatures of migration, translation studies, and postwar German literature and culture. She works on topography and space in literature, theories of language, and on the relation between literature and mathematics. Arslan has published on the Turkish author and director Emine Sevgi Özdamar (who writes in German), on synesthesia in the works of Paul Celan and Yoko Tawada, and has spoken about literature “beyond the multilingual-monolingual divide.”
Bettina Brandt is Teaching Professor of German at Pennsylvania State University. Her own background, like that of several of our speakers, is multinational, multicultural, and multilingual, as she grew up in Germany, the Netherlands, and in French-speaking Belgium. Brandt works on twentieth- and twenty-first-century transnational literature, literary multilingualism and translation studies, and literatures of migration, among other areas. Her current book in progress is Cutting Out: Radical Figures and Letters on the Move, and she has co-edited volumes on China in the German Enlightenment and on travel and early relations between the Low Countries and the New World.
Claudia Breger is the Villard Professor of German and Comparative Culture at Columbia University. Her research foci include theater and performance studies, media and cultural theory, and intersections of gender, sexuality, and race. Her first book, Ortlosigkeit des Fremden (1998), was about the history of modern representations of Romani and other itinerant people at the intersection of race and gender around 1800. In Szenarian kopfloser Herrschaft (2004), Breger examined imaginings of royalty beyond sovereignty in twentieth-century German culture. Her other books include An Aesthetics of Narrative Performance (2012) and Nach dem Sex? (2014). Currently Breger is working on Making Worlds: Affect and Collectivity in Contemporary European Cinema. She argues that the power of cinema to do “worldmaking” grants contemporary film the ability to reimagine collectivity (among other things, beyond the limits of the nation and the “national” language).
Veronika Fuechtner is Chair and Associate Professor of German Studies at Dartmouth College, and is also Adjunct Associate Professor in Psychiatry at the Geisel School of Medicine. Fuechtner co-edited volumes entitled A Global History of Sexual Science 1880-1960 and Imagining Germany, Imagining Asia. She is the author of Berlin Psychoanalytic (2011), and currently is at work on a book on Thomas Mann’s Brazilian mother and Mann’s construction of race and “Germanness.”
Paul Michael Luetzeler is Rosa May Distinguished Professor in the Humanities and the Director of the Max Kade Center for Contemporary German Literature at Washington University in St. Louis. Luetzeler’s many publications include over ten books, which focus on ideas and constructions of Europe, exile literature, and German-American cultural relations, among other topics. He is President of the American Friends of Marbach, President of the International Hermann Broch Society, and on the executive committee of the Society for Intercultural German Studies.
B. Venkat Mani is Professor of German at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He speaks Turkish, Hindi, and Urdu in addition to German and English. His research and teaching interests include the histories and stories of migrants and refugees in Germany, Europe, and elsewhere, the cultural histories of digital and print media, and theories of cosmopolitanism, globalization, post-colonialism, and transnationalism. Mani is co-editor of the Wiley-Blackwell Companion to World Literature. His books on transnational and world literature received wide acclaim: Recoding World Literature: Libraries, Print Culture, and Germany’s Pact With Books (2017), and Cosmopolitical Claims: Turkish-German Literatures from Nadolny to Pamuk (2007). Mani also directs the University of Wisconsin’s Center for South Asia.
Carl Niekerk is Professor of German at the University of Illinois, with affiliations in the Program in Comparative and World Literature, French, and Jewish Studies. His books include Reading Mahler (2010), Zwischen Naturgeschichte und Anthropologie (2005), and Bildungskrisen (1995). He has published numerous articles on German literature and culture since 1750, Dutch culture, Dutch-Indonesian colonial and postcolonial culture, Austrian culture, and Jewish-German culture. At the University of Illinois, he teaches a popular course entitled “Europe in Trouble.”
Scott Spector is Rudolf Mrazek Collegiate Professor of History and German Studies at the University of Michigan. He works on intellectual and cultural history, ideas of Europe, gender studies and sexuality, and law and society. His multiple books range from Prague Territories: National Conflict and Cultural Innovation in Franz Kafka’s Fin de Siècle (2000) to Modernism Without Jews? German-Jewish Subjects and Histories (2017). Spector works to uncover previously unseen relationships between politics and culture by examining the history of and tracing connections between the social, cultural, and ideological contexts in which literature and other cultural products are made.
Moderators at the conference are Christiane Eydt-Beebe (German, Eastern Illinois University), Imke Meyer (German, University of Illinois-Chicago), and Heidi Schlipphacke (German, University of Illinois-Chicago), and Meike Werner (German, Vanderbilt University).