Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature and German (Ph.D. University of Michigan, 1984) is co-director of the graduate program in German. His fields of specialization include criticism and theory, epistolarity, eighteenth-century literature, translation (theory, practice, and literary mimesis), mental maps in literature, and law and literature. Publications include Clarissa on the Continent (Penn State Press 1991), The Ideology Of Genre (Penn State Press 1994), Epistolary Fiction in Europe (Cambridge UP 1999), Millennial Literatures of the Americas, 1492 – 2002 (2008); Nation and Region in Modern European and American Fiction (Purdue UP 2008). Articles include "A Literature of Theory: Christa Wolf's Kassandra Lectures as Feminist Anti-Poetics" (with Beverly Weber); "The Öffentlichkeit of Jürgen Habermas," "Ways of Seeing Italy: Goethe's Italienische Reise and its Counter-Narratives," and “Carl Schmitt and the Myth of Benito Cereno.” His most recent books are Conjunctions and Disjunctions of German Law and Literature (Continuum 2011), and Transmesis: Inside Translation’s Black Box (Palgrave-MacMillan, forthcoming). Office: 445 Burrowes (863-4935). E-mail: tob@psu.edu
Bettina Brandt earned Master’s degrees in French and German from the University of Utrecht and a PhD from Harvard University in Comparative Literature with a dissertation on Germanophone women associated with the historical avant-garde, particularly Surrealism. She has published numerous essays on Yoko Tawada, Herta Müller, Emine Sevgi Özdamar, Elfriede Jelinek as well as articles on writers and artists from earlier periods. Her translations of German fiction include contemporary German-Jewish writers into English and the first Dutch edition of Tawada’s stories. She is currently writing a scholarly treatment on transnational literature in the experimental mode and co-editing a collection of essays on the Nobel laureate, Herta Müller. Before coming to Penn State, she taught as an assistant professor at MIT, Columbia University and Montclair State University. Office: 421 Burrowes (863-7487) E-Mail: ubb2@psu.edu
Samuel Frederick is an Assistant Professor of German. He received his Ph.D. in German Studies from Cornell University, after which he spent four years in the Department of Languages at Clemson University. In his research and teaching he focuses primarily on nineteenth and twentieth century literature and culture. He is particularly interested in Swiss and Austrian literature, narratology and the history of the novel, experimental fiction, modernism and the avant-garde, and film. He is the author of one monograph, Narratives Unsettled: Digression in Robert Walser, Thomas Bernhard, and Adalbert Stifter (Northwestern University Press, 2012), as well as articles and essays on Oswald Egger, the Quay Brothers, and Friedrich von Blanckenburg, among others. In addition to co-translating (with the American poet Graham Foust) two volumes of poetry by Ernst Meister (the first of which, In Time’s Rift, was published by Wave Books in 2012), he is co-editing a collection of new scholarship on Robert Walser.
Assistant Professor of German
smf35@psu.edu
421 Burrowes Building
814-863-7487
Linda J. Ivanits, is a Professor of Russian and Comparative Literature. She received her PhD in Russian literature from the University of Wisconsin in June 1973. Her dissertation treated the grotesque in the Symbolist writer F. K. Sologub's novel The Petty Demon. In August 1973 Dr. Ivanits joined the Department of Slavic Languages at Penn State where she taught a variety of courses on Russian language, literature and folklore. Her research interests include nineteenth and twentieth-century Russian literature and Russian folklore. Her publications include articles on the writers F.K. Sologub, F.M. Dostoevsky, and the problem of folklore in literature as well as the books Russian Folk Belief (M.E. Sharpe, 1987) and Dostoevsky and the Russian People (Cambridge University Press, 2008). She is presently working on a book-length study of the use of folklore in literary works to probe national identity, tentatively titled Folklore, Literature, and Russian National Identity in the Reign of Nicholas I. Dr. Ivanits has also served as Associate Editor for Literature and Folklore of The Slavic and East European Journal and as Series Editor for Folklores and Folk Cultures of Eastern Europe published by M.E.Sharpe. Office: 408 Burrowes (865-1681). E-mail: lji1@psu.edu
Carrie Jackson is an Associate Professor of German and Linguistics. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, specializing in Germanic linguistics and second language acquisition. Her research and teaching interests include psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, language acquisition and foreign language pedagogy. She has published articles in a variety of linguistics and applied linguistics journals including Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, Applied Psycholinguistics, Language Learning and The Modern Language Journal. Office: 415 Burrowes (863-7488). E-mail: cnj1@psu.edu
Galina Khmelkova has been teaching Russian at Penn State since 1991. She graduated in 1974 from Patrice Lumumba People's Friendship University in Moscow and has been teaching Russian language and culture in Laos, Slovakia, and at the Pedagogical University in her hometown of Volgograd, Russia. She has taught a wide range of courses, including Beginning, Intermediate and Advanced Russian, Russian Culture and Civilization (both in Rusian and in English), Business Russian, Russian Literature, Readings in Russian History and Culture, Russian Conversation and Russian Comprehension. Recently she developed and taught her Russian culture class as a web-based course. She also taught an introduction to Russian for agriculturalists via interactive video hook-up to students at various agricultural colleges in the USA. Ms. Khelkova is the recipient of several awards, including the Jan Amos Komenski Medal for Teaching, Slovakia, 1986, and the College of the Liberal Arts Excellence in Teaching Award for Non-Tenure Line Faculty, 2003. E-mail: gak2@psu.edu
Martina Kolb
Assistant Professor of German and Comparative Literature
Ph. D. Yale University
M. Phil. Yale University
Staatsexamen University of Tübingen
M. A. University of Oregon, Eugene
Fields of Specialization: International Modernism; Comparative (Geo-)Poetics; European Studies; Mediterranean Studies; Travel Literature, Theater East-West; Detective Literature; Psychoanalysis. Publications include articles on the Uncanny in Uwe Johnson, on Ezra Pound’s Prison Writing, on Bertolt Brecht’s Appropriations of Oriental Theater, on Friedrich Nietzsche’s Presence in Sigmund Freud, and on Gottfried Benn's dealings with Italian Futurism; Book Project on Mediterranean Geo-Poetics.
Before joining Penn State, Martina Kolb taught as Visiting Assistant Professor in the Humanities Core Curriculum at Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey. She is the recipient of a number of awards, among them a Giles Whiting Dissertation Fellowship, two Postdoctoral Fellowships at the Institutes of Advanced Studies at the Universities of Konstanz (ZWN) and Bologna (ISA), as well as an Individual Faculty Grant and a Residency at Penn State’s Institute for the Arts and Humanities. Office: 416 Burrowes (865-0068). E-mail: muk23@psu.edu
Willard Martin earned his B.A. (1961) in history at Goshen College and his M.A. (1966) and Ph.D. (1973) in German at Penn State. Throughout his career he has combined teaching and administration. His teaching has included a variety of undergraduate courses in German language, literature, and culture. In administration he was director for academic affairs at the McKeesport Campus of Penn State, academic dean of Goshen College, and chief administrator and dean of the Schwäbisch Gmünd campus of UMUC in Germany. He served on many committees at these locations and as a board member of the Pennsylvania German Society for nine years and the James Byrnes Society in Stuttgart, Germany, for five. He directed a study abroad group for a semester in the former East Germany and a study abroad program for two years in Marburg, Germany. At Penn State he and a colleague did research on the Pennsylvania German dialect, and he started a course on Pennsylvania German culture. He has given numerous speeches on the Amish and plain Mennonites to a variety of groups and organizations. Currently he teaches mostly elementary and intermediate German courses and an evening section of Pennsylvania Germans: The Culture of the Sectarians in the spring semester. Office: 428 Burrowes (863-7484) E-mail: wmm10@psu.edu
Irina Mikaelian, Ph.D., University of Provence, France, 2002; graduated from Moscow State University in 1982. Initially specialized in Romance (French and Italian) Languages, she taught French and Italian at The Russian State University of Humanities, Moscow. Subsequently, she spent ten years in France (1994 - 2004) teaching Russian Language and related subjects, such as History of Russian Languages, Advanced Russian Grammar and Syntax, Translation from and into Russian, Russian History reflected in Russian Cinema. She taught, in particular, at the University of Provence, University of Lyon, and University of Grenoble. Her main research interests lay in Russian and general linguistics with particular emphasis on syntax and semantics. She has presented papers at international scientific meeting on Slavic, Russian and general linguistics in Russia, France, Spain and the USA. Office: 419 Burrowes (863-7486) E-mail: ixm12@psu.edu
is Woskob Family Professor of Ukrainian Studies and teaches Ukrainian and Russian language and literature. He received his BA and MA from The American University, and his Ph.D. from Columbia University. He has published over 30 articles on literary topics and more that 50 translations in journals and anthologies. His books of translations include: The Poetry of Lina Kostenko: Wanderings of the Heart (1990), Marina Tsvetaeva's "After Russia" (1992), "The Windows of Time Frozen" and Other Stories by Yuri Vynnychuk (2000), Yuri Andrukhovych’s novel Perverzion (2005), and The Essential Poetry of Bohdan Ihor Antonych: Ecstasies and Elegies (2010). He co-edited and co-translated From Three Worlds: New Writing from Ukraine (1996) as well as the anthology A Hundred Years of Youth: A Bilingual Anthology of 20th Century Ukrainian Poetry (2000). With Slava Yastremski he has co-translated a book of Olga Sedakova's poetry, Poems and Elegies (2004), Igor Klekh's prose, A Country the Size of Binoculars (2004), and Olga Sedakova’s collection Freedom to Believe: Philosophical and Cultural Essays (2010). He has received the 1993 Eugene Kayden Meritorious Achievement Award in Translation, the 1996, 2006 and 2008 Award in Translation from the American Association of Ukrainian Studies, and the Nytchenko Prize from the League of Ukrainian Philanthropists (2001). Office: 404 (865-1675) E-mail:mmn3@psu.edu
received his Ph.D. in Germanic linguistics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1994. He teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in the areas of linguistics, German, and Pennsylvania German culture. His research interests include older Germanic dialects, historical linguistics, language change, language contact, Pennsylvania German, and phonology. He has published articles on Germanic linguistics in a variety of journals including Beiträge zur Geschichte der deutschen Sprache und Literatur, Diachronica, Journal of Germanic Linguistics, and Lingua. Aaron D. Rubin and he are co-editors of Studies in Classical Linguistics in Honor of Philip Baldi (Brill, 2010). In addition, he has worked with Julia Kasdorf, Joshua Brown, the Mifflin County Mennonite Historical Society and Penn State University Libraries to collect oral histories of Pennsylvania German Anabaptists in nearby Big Valley. Office: 403 Burrowes (863-8964). E-mail:brp3@psu.edu
Daniel Purdy was born in Berlin and raised bilingually in New York City. He received his Ph.D. from Cornell University in 1992. Before arriving at Penn State University, he taught for nine years at Columbia University. His research specializes on the connections between material culture and philosophical thought. Much of his writing concentrates on the Goethezeit. Having written about consumer culture and architectural theory, his current project focuses on the German reception of Chinese culture in the early modern period. In 1998, he published a study on fashion culture and male identity, The Tyranny of Elegance: Consumer Cosmopolitanism in the Era of Goethe, with Johns Hopkins University Press. In 2005 the University of Minnesota Press published his collection of historical writings about style, The Rise of Fashion. His latest book, On the Ruins of Babel: Architectural Metaphor in German Thought, appeared in July 2011 with Cornell University Press. His most recent article in 2011 is entitled, “Berlin Mitte and the Anxious Disavowal of Beijing Modernism: Architectural Polemics within Globalization.” Currently, Professor Purdy serves as editor for the North American Goethe Yearbook, as well as a co-director of the Max Kade Research Institute at Penn State.
Daniel Purdy has received grants from the DAAD, the Stiftung Weimarer Klassik and the Humboldt Foundation. Office: 406 Burrowes (863-1353) E-mail: dlp14@psu.edu
Michael Putnam is an Assistant Professor of German and Linguistics. He is an alumnus of the University of Kansas (Ph.D. 2006) and has primary research interests in the following areas: Germanic linguistics, philosophy of language, bilingualism, learnability and linguistic theory, morphology, semantics, sociolinguistics, and heritage linguistics (including Pennsylvania German). He is the author of Scrambling and the Survive Principle (2007) and editor of Towards a Derivational Syntax: Survive-minimalism (2009), Exploring Crash-Proof Grammars (2010) and Studies on German-language Islands (2011). He has also published in a variety of journals, including Linguistic Analysis, The Linguistic Review, The Journal of Comparative Germanic Linguistics, Syntax and Zeitschrift für Dialektologie und Linguistik. He teaches various courses in German and Linguistics at both the undergraduate and graduate level, and also serves as the lower-division coordinator for the undergraduate German program.
Dennis Schmidt, a Liberal Arts Professor of Philosophy, began a partial appointment in the German Department as of Fall 2005. Professor Schmidt's areas of specialization include Ancient Philosophy, Post-Kantian Continental Philosophy, Aesthetics, and Literary Criticism. He is the author of several books, including Between Word and Image: Heidegger, Gadamer, and Klee (Indiana University Press, forthcoming), Idiome der Wahrheit (Klostermann Verlag, 2012), Lyrical and Ethical Subjects (SUNY Press, 2005), On Germans and Other Greeks (Indiana University Press, 2001), Hermeneutische Wege (co-edited with Günter Figal, Mohr-Siebeck Verlag, 2000), and The Ubiquity of the Finite (MIT Press, 1988). He has also translated Ernst Bloch’s Natural Law and Human Dignity (1986), and Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time (revised and edited translation with a foreword, 2009). Among his current research projects are a book about the idea of nature and an investigation of the notion of freedom. He is also currently working on a number of smaller scale projects dealing with a variety of topics such as translation, Walter Benjamin, Heidegger, the Funeral Oration in Athens , the notion of earth, and the idea of race in Nazi Germany. Office: 208 Sparks (865-1919). E-mail: djs61@psu.edu
Adrian Wanner, Professor of Russian and Comparative Literature, served as head of the Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literatures from 2001 to 2008 and is currently co-director of the graduate program in German. He has published numerous articles in Slavic and comparative literature journals and is the author of three monographs: Baudelaire in Russia (University Press of Florida, 1996), Russian Minimalism: From the Prose Poem to the Anti-Story (Northwestern University Press, 2003), and Out of Russia: Fictions of a New Translingual Diaspora (Northwestern University Press, 2011). In addition he has published five editions of Russian, Romanian, and Ukrainian poetry in his German verse translation.
E-mail: ajw3@psu.edu
N. Hülya Yilmaz is Senior Lecturer in German and instructor in Comparative Literature Studies. She earned her Ph.D. at The University of Michigan in German literature with her comparative dissertation on the influence of Sufism upon 19th and 20th century German poetry. She authored a book on the same subject, Das Ghasel des islamischen Orients in der deutschen Dichtung. She specializes in contemporary German literature with a primary focus on Germany's minority authors and the implementation of feminist theory in modern day Germany within the Islamic context. Her current research interests include migrant literature of Germany; Islam in Germany and in the U.S.; transnational and diasporic literatures; and gender and identity issues within Islam. Her teaching background and interests encompass German language, literature and culture; Germany's ghazal writers and Turkish authors; female representation in German mainstream and migrant writings; and literary reflections of Islamic feminist practices in contemporary Turkish-German and Turkish literatures. In Spring 2012 her book chapter on Orhan Pamuk, recipient of the 2006 Nobel Prize in Literature, will appear in Global Perspectives on Orhan Pamuk: Existentialism and Politics (Literatures and Cultures of the Islamic World (M. M. Afridi and D. M. Buvze, Eds.; Palgrave McMillan). She also has a poem “twinning with Munch: silent scream” forthcoming in the Spring 2012 issue of Pastiche from the OLLI Penn State Writers Group Office: 418 Burrowes (863-7489)E-mail: hnu1@psu.edu.
Eleonora K. Adams is Associate Professor of German. She teaches German and Russian at Penn State Abington, but holds her tenure in the German Department at University Park. She received her Ph.D. from University of Pennsylvania, with a comparative study of Franz Werfel and Lev Tolstoy. Her scholarship includes publications and conference presentations on Werfel, Tolstoy, Hoffmannsthal Arthur Schnitzler and Mychaylo Kotziubynskyj, as well as several aspects of Russian and Ukrainian literature. Her current research is focused on a group of post WWII German rocket scientists, who while living an isolated life in Russia, had created an intellectual life (apart from their professional life) for themselves and their families on the secluded island of Gorodomlya. E-mail: eka2@psu.edu
Gabriela Appel is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Linguistics and Applied Language Studies and an Affiliate of the Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literatures. She holds a Staatsexamen für das Lehramt (magna cum laude) in Foreign Language Education from the University of Kassel (Germany) and a doctoral degree in Applied Linguistics from the University of Delaware. Before coming to Penn State in 1999, she taught for eight years at Cornell University and two years at the University of Delaware. At University Park, in addition to having taught German language and Business German courses, she offers a graduate seminar on Second Language Vocabulary and one on Second Language Reading. Her research interests are in Vocabulary Learning and Teaching, Assessment and Evaluation and Teacher Education. Since 2001, she is an Associate Editor of the Modern Language Journal and since 2002, the Program Coordinator of the Center for Advanced Language Proficiency Education and Research (CALPER) at Penn State. Email: gxa9@psu.edu.
Greg Eghigian is an associate professor of modern European history, specializing in the history of 20th century Germany. He received his Ph. D. from the University of Chicago in 1993. Before coming to Penn State, he was Schmidt Fellow at the University of Chicago and taught at the University of Texas at Arlington. His research and teaching interests focus on modern German political, social, cultural, and intellectual history with a particular interest in the history of the self and the human sciences in 20th century Germany. His publications have examined such topics as the role of sacrifice in German nationalism, pain and disability in German social policy, madness and identity following World War II, and East German conceptions of deviance. He is currently working on a book, tentatively entitled "The Reconstructed Personality: Crime, Politics, and Forensic Psychology in Germany, 1933-1989," that examines how politics and psychology defined ideals of personhood and normality in Nazi, West, and East Germany. Email:gae2@psu.edu
Hartmut Heep was educated at the University of Mainz, Germany. In 1993, he received his doctorate in Comparative Literature from the University of Illinois. He is Associate Professor of German and Comparative Literature and the author of A Different Poem: Rainer Maria Rilke's American Translators Randall Jarrell, Robert Lowell, and Robert Bly, as well as the editor of Unreading Rilke: Unorthodox Approaches to a Cultural Myth. Dr. Heep has published on Brecht, Schiller, Flaubert, Apollinaire, and gender studies. He recently received a Fulbright Lectureship award and will be teaching American and Gender Studies at the University of Mumbai, India.
Barton W. Browning specializes in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century authors with a particular emphasis on the works of Heinrich Julius von Braunschweig. As a fellow of the Herzog August Library at Wolfenbüttel, he has received several grants to pursue his research on Lohenstein and Mannerist drama. In addition to his service as a member of the editorial board of Colloquia Germanica and as a reader for various journals, he was also a founding officer of the Society for German Renaissance and Baroque Literature. His further scholarly interests include the development of German drama in its historical context and nineteenth-century Austrian prose with a special emphasis on Adalbert Stifter. On occasion he also makes forays into the early twentieth century as in the work of Joseph Roth. His most recent work deals with literary depictions of the seven deadly sins during German Renaissance with special attention to the sin of gluttony and such inverted guides to correct behavior and proper table manners as Dedekinds Grobianus. E-mail: bwb2@psu.edu
Francis G. Gentry (emeritus) came to Penn State from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1991 as head of the Department of German, a position he held until 1997 when he stepped down to be able to devote more time to his research and teaching interests. His research agenda encompasses broad areas of Medieval culture and Medieval German literature as well as also the reception of the Middle Ages in the modern period. He is the author and editor of seven books and a few dozen articles, most recently the Companion to Middle High German Studies (Brill) and The Nibelungen Tradition: An Encyclopedia (Routledge), of which he is co-editor. He has been a faculty member at SUNY-Albany and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he was also department chair. In 1984 he served as a Lehrstuhlvertreter (Lehrstuhl Schupp) at the Universität Freiburg. He is past president of the Medieval Association of the Midwest. He served on the editorial board of the German Quarterly (1991-1994), was for many years the German Editor for Studies in Medievalism, and the book review editor for Monatshefte. He has lectured extensively both here and abroad on medieval and modern topics and was a recipient of an Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship (1978/79, 1984) for research in Munich and Freiburg. E-mail: fgg1@psu.edu.
Manfred E. Keune (emeritus) came to PSU in 1967 as assistant professor of German and retired in 1999. As a member of the former Department of German and the current Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literatures his research and publications concentrated on 19 th and 20 th century literature and focused on Theodor Fontane, Lion Feuchtwanger, Günter Kunert, Fritz Reuter and B. Traven. He co-edited and contributed to the books The Berlin Wall-Reality and Symbol and Kunert Werkstatt. In his work on intercultural relations, he taught high school teachers in NEH programs and courses in German-American relations. He has worked extensively as a translator and has taught, written, and published poetry. Among his teaching and curriculum design activities, he worked with Education Abroad programs, Intensive German, German Studies courses, German Business and Engineering and a wide variety of culture, language, and literature courses and seminars on the undergraduate and graduate level. In his retirement, he continues to write and is a member of the P.E.N. Center of German Writers Abroad. He continues to teach seminars on communication and German cultural history for the Renaissance Academy of Florida Gulf Coast University and CALL( Community Academy for Lifelong Learning) in State College, Pennsylvania. In the last twenty years he became interested in the emerging discipline of ontological design which focuses on the power of language in private and professional endeavors. Combining his academic and organizational background, he coaches in the domains of ethics, communication, and conflict resolution. Manfred E. Keune was born in Germany where he worked in industry, and he graduated from Bowling Green State University (BA) and Michigan State University (MA, PhD). He resides in Centre Hall, Pennsylvania.
William Schmalstieg, Sparks Professor emeritus of Slavic and Baltic Linguistics, taught at Penn State from 1964 until his retirement in 2001. From 1969 to 1991 he served as head of the Department of Slavic Languages. His teaching concentrated on Slavic linguistics, Russian, Old Church Slavic as well as courses in Baltic languages and linguistics, primarily Lithuanian. Bill Schmalstieg is the author of numerous books and articles in the fields of Slavic, Baltic and Indo-European linguistics. His historical grammars of Old Church Slavic and Old Russian are widely used in North American universities. He has done path-breaking work on Lithuanian syntax and Baltic verb morphology, and he is also known for his important publications on Old Prussian. After Lithuania regained its independence in 1991, the Lithuanian government officially honored Professor Schmalstieg for his accomplishments in the study of the Lithuanian language.
Ernst I. Schürer (emeritus) has taught undergraduate and graduate courses on modern German literature and culture, with emphasis on expressionism, literature in exile, drama and theater, German business, and Pennsylvania German culture. While his research interests are centered on German literature form naturalism to the present, especially in the field of expressionism and drama, he also likes to investigate the riddle of B. Traven, follow the tracks of German immigrants to Pennsylvania, discuss Emil Nolde's art as well as Carl Sternheims fascination with photography. At the present time Professor Schürer is working on articles on B. Travens novels and expressionist drama and a monograph provisionally entitled "The Economy as a Motif in Modern German Drama". His latest publications include Else Lasker-Schüler: Ansichten und Perspektiven - Views and Reviews (Tübingen, 1999), German Expressionist Plays (New York, 1997), The Berlin Wall. Representations and Perspectives (New York, 1996), and Franz Jung. Leben und Werk eines Rebellen (New York, 1994). E-mail: exs2@psu.edu
Gerhard F. Straßer retired in 2004 as professor emeritus after 25 years at Penn State. Some of his recent publications focus on the work of the German 17th-century polyhistor, Athanasius Kircher; in commemoration of his 400th birthday on May 2, 2002, he organized an exhibit at the Herzog August Bibliothek for which a "virtual tour" is available at URL: http://www.hab.de/ausstellung/kircher/index.htm. In 2000, he published Emblematik und Mnemonik im Zusammenspiel, and in 2004 the co-edition of a symposium entitled Die Domänen des Emblems, highlighting his renewed interest in emblematics and mnemonics. In the same year Dr. Straßer returned to his native Bavaria. He continues his research work at the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek in Munich, where he is working in rather separate areas—emblematics, cryptology, and historical linguistics. In 2007, "The Rise of Cryptology in the European Renaissance" appeared in The History of Information Security. A Comprehensive Handbook. Amsterdam (Holland) et al.: Elsevier, 277-325. In September of 2007, he co-organized a symposium at the Herzog August Bibliothek with Dr. Thomas Stäcker of this library on "Bibliotheken und ihre Nutzer, 1650-1850." A year later, Dr. Straßer brought to Penn State Libraries an exhibition on the heroic rescue by a local policeman of 13 Nazi concentraction camp prisoners on their death march through Bavaria in April of 1945, and in 2011 he participated at Ergoldsbach (Bavaria), the town where the 13 prisoners were rescued, in a follow-up exhibit that researched the fate of these survivors. “Von der Lingua Adamica zur Lingua universalis“ came out in Diskurse der Gelehrtenkultur in der Frühen Neuzeit, a collection of essays edited by Herbert Jaumann for De Gruyter in Berlin in 2011, 517-592. In the summer of 2012 he took part in a symposium at the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek discussing “Zwischen Utopie und Wirklichkeit: Konstruierte Sprachen für die globalisierte Welt“; an expanded version of his presentation is accessible through the URL: http://www.bsb-muenchen.de/Virtuelle-Ausstellung-Konstruierte-Sprachen.3570.0.html (bottom of page, “Ansätze zu internationaler Verständigung durch konstruierte Sprachen“). At the same time a second, extensive on-line publication appeared at the Herzog August Bibliothek—the edition (in English) of an illustrated para-emblematic French sonnet sequence from 1600, URL: http://diglib.hab.de/edoc/ed000166/start.htm. With Prof. Christian Biet, Université de Paris X, he is currently preparing this on-line material for a publication in French in the series, Classiques Garnier. - In the fall of 2012, Dr. Straßer was given the College of the Liberal Arts Emeritus Distinction Award. E-mail: gfs1@psu.edu.
Vickie L. Ziegler Emeritus Professor of German Literature and Medieval Studies, came to Penn State after receiving her Ph.D. at Yale University. She has written three books and co-edited two others, as well as a number of articles. Her two first books were on Middle High German Minnesang, The Leitword in Minnesang, and on Achim von Arnim and E.T.A. Hoffmann, Bending the Frame: The Cyclical Narrative in German Romanticism. Her most recent book, Trial by Fire and Battle in Medieval German Literature, appeared in Spring 2004. Her current research plans include another book on literary accounts of legal matters. Professor Ziegler's interdisciplinary research interests parallel her administrative ones. Under her direction, medieval studies at Penn State has grown from a tiny program to a nationally respected Center for Medieval Studies. Professor Ziegler is currently on the board of CARA, the Medieval Academy organization for center directors, and President of TEAMS, the consortium for teaching the Middle Ages. E-mail: vlz1@psu.edu
Jutta Gsoels-Lorensen. Associate Professor of German, Penn State Altoona
Irene Hurd. Lecturer in Russian, Penn State Altoona
Eva Kuttenberg, Associate Professor of German, Penn State Erie, The Behrend College
Marlene PIlarcik Soulsby, Associate Professor of German and Comparative Literature, Penn State Worthington Scranton
lse-Rose Warg, Lecturer in German, Penn State Altoona
