Liz Schoppelrei is a sixth-year PhD Candidate in the dual-title program of Comparative Literature and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. They also hold a minor in German. With a strong focus on German queer culture, their dissertation examines textual representations of queer community and how taxonomies of gender and sexuality can undergird speculative community formation. Their research interests include: Weimar lesbian and transvestite periodicals, American poetry slam, queer theory, feminist theory, and queer and trans community formation.

Their article “‘Full Body Intersection’: Fat Positive Activism, Poetry Slam, and Rachel Wiley” appeared in Fat Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Body Weight and Society in 2018. During the 2019-2020 academic year, they were a Fulbright Graduate Fellow at the Universität Potsdam, completing research on their project: “Contested Communities: Lesbian and Transvestite Poetry in Die Freundin (1924-1933).” Their second article “The Queer Intimacies of Roses in Louise Aston’s ‘Wilde Rosen’ (1846) and ‘Die wilde Rose’ (1850)” was published in QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking in 2020.

Classes taught:

CMLIT 122 (Global Science Fictions): Emphasis on gender and sexuality in sci-fi

CMLIT 101 (Race, Gender, and Identity in World Literature): Emphasis on graphic narrative forms

CMLIT 10 (Introduction to World Literature)

GER 1 (Elementary German 1)

Areas of Specialization:

20th and 21st Century Poetry

Gender and Sexuality

Weimar Queer Culture

Queer and Feminist Theory