Faculty

The Department of German, Nordic, Slavic & Dutch is a dynamic community of faculty, instructors, and graduate students. Our faculty are known nationally and internationally for their research and teaching in the medieval and pre-modern area, transnational interdisciplinary studies (from cultural and gender studies to environmental humanities, intellectual history, Jewish studies, and film), and second-language acquisition.

Faculty

Name	Contact	Specialties
Benjamin Bigelow Associate Professor Director of Undergraduate Studies	328E Folwell Hall 612-626-3327 bbigelow@umn.edu	Scandinavian literature and culture
Nadya Clayton Senior Lecturer	320D Folwell Hall 612-626-6335 nclayton@umn.edu	Russian language & literature
Emily Groepper Lecturer	328B Folwell Hall groep005@umn.edu	Medieval Germanic languages and literatures; history of emotions; language pedagogy
Thomas Gurke DAAD Visiting Associate Professor	327B Folwell Hall tgurke@umn.edu	Intermediality and Word and Music Studies, Popular Culture, Affect, Contemporary fiction, Ecology, (the) Short-story
Ari Hoptman Senior Lecturer	329B Folwell Hall 612-625-6557 hoptm001@umn.edu	German Language
Arsena Ianeva-Lockney Senior Lecturer	328B Folwell Hall 612-625-0999 ianev001@umn.edu	German language; business German; beginning Norwegian language
Gary R. Jahn Professor	320H Folwell Hall 612-625-6557 gjahn@umn.edu	Russian language & literature

Elizabeth Kautz Education Program Specialist	328B Folwell Hall 612-625-0738 kautz001@umn.edu	German language
Katerina Korola Assistant Professor	328F Folwell Hall 612-626-1620 kkorola@umn.edu	German Modernism, History of Photography, Early and Silent Cinema, Modern Art, and the Environmental Humanities
Kyle Korynta Lecturer	327J Folwell Hall 612-625-4059 kory0008@umn.edu	Norwegian language
Anatoly Liberman Professor	323A Folwell Hall 612-625-5594 aliber@umn.edu	General linguistics; Germanic philology; folklore; poetic translation
Erik McDonald Senior Lecturer	320K Folwell Hall 612-626-7971 emcdonal@umn.edu	Russian language & literature
Leslie Morris Chair Professor Beverly and Richard Fink Professor in Liberal Arts	327A Folwell Hall 612-624-4047 morri074@umn.edu	German Jewish studies; Holocaust & memory studies; 20th- & 21st-century German and Austrian literature; comparative literature & literary theory; experimental poetry; psychoanalysis; medical humanities
Lily Obeda	320M Folwell Hall 612-626-1651 obeda003@umn.edu	Finnish Language
Jenneke Oosterhoff Senior Lecturer	320N Folwell Hall 612-624-1041 ooste003@umn.edu	Dutch culture and literature; Dutch and German film; turn-of-the-century German and Austrian literature; business German
Jennifer Peterson Senior Teaching Specialist	328B Folwell Hall 612-625-0738 peter511@umn.edu	German language
Matthias Rothe Associate Professor Director of Graduate Studies	328G Folwell Hall 612-625-9034 mrothe@umn.edu	18th-century political philosophy; philosophical and literary presentability of economic practices; Brechtian and contemporary theater
Helena Ruf Senior Lecturer Director of Language Instruction	327D Folwell Hall 612-625-3380 rahd0001@umn.edu	German language
Virginia Steinhagen Senior Lecturer	320J Folwell Hall 612-626-2879 stein093@umn.edu	German language
Jamele Watkins Assistant Professor	327C Folwell Hall 612-625-4898 watkinsj@umn.edu	20th- and 21st-century German literature and history; Black diasporic studies; performance studies; feminist studies; German film
Irina Zaykovskaya Lecturer	320B Folwell Hall 612-626-1894 irzaykov@umn.edu	Russian language; second language acquisition; sociolinguistics; language ideologies and attitudes

Affiliate Faculty

Name	Contact	Specialties
Siobhan Craig Associate Professor English	craig026@umn.edu	German and Italian cinema; literary, film, feminist, and queer theory
Kirsten Fischer Professor History	kfischer@umn.edu	Memory and Memoir in the 20th century; American Social History; Religious Freethought in Early America; Racism and Slavery in Colonial America - current book project is a hybrid family history/memoir about father's German family in 20th-century Germany
Sheer Ganor Assistant Professor History	sganor@umn.edu	German-speaking Jewry; 20th-century German history; forced migration; Holocaust; memory studies
Sarah Holtman Professor Philosophy	holtm001@umn.edu	Moral and Political Philosophy; Philosophy of Law; Kant's Practical Philosophy
Michal Kobialka Professor Theatre Arts and Dance	kobia001@umn.edu	European avant-garde theatre/performance; post-World War II theatre/performance; Tadeusz Kantor's theatre; post-World War II history of Central European visual/performance art; theatre/performance culture of the Enlightenment; theatre/performance historiography
Bernard M. Levinson Professor Berman Family Chair in Jewish Studies & Hebrew Bible Classical & Near Eastern Studies; Law School	levinson@umn.edu	Hebrew Bible; ancient Judaism; Bible and Humanities; German intellectual history (Goethe, Kant)
Howard Louthan Professor History	hlouthan@umn.edu	Early modern Central and Eastern European history; Reformation and Counter-Reformation; history of religion
Alice Lovejoy Associate Professor Cultural Studies & Comparative Literature	alovejoy@umn.edu	Film and media history and historiography; East Central European film; literature and cultural history
Mary Jo Maynes Professor History	mayne001@umn.edu	19th- and 20th-century German history; social history; women’s history
Michael Bennett McNulty Assistant Professor Philosophy	mcnu0074@umn.edu	Immanuel Kant; history of early modern philosophy; history of philosophy of science
Karen Painter Associate Professor Music	kpainter@umn.edu	19th- and 20th-century German and Austrian music history
Dan Philippon Associate Professor English	danp@umn.edu	Environmental literature, history and ethics; ideas of nature, culture, and place; food studies
Joachim Savelsberg Professor Sociology	savel001@umn.edu	Human rights; law, collective representation and memory of mass violence
Joachim Savelsberg Professor Sociology	savel001@umn.edu	Human rights; law, collective representation and memory of mass violence
Andrew Scheil Professor English	ascheil@umn.edu	Anglo-Saxon language and literature; Middle English and medieval Latin literature
Henning Schroeder Professor Department of Pharmaceutics	schro601@umn.edu	Education & health care in Germany & the US; history of patriotism & nationalism; constitutions & legal systems in Germany & the US; Rhineland & Rhenish capitalism
Damion Searls Translator	dsearls@umn.edu	Independent translator from German, Norwegian, French, and Dutch
JB Shank Professor History	jbshank@umn.edu	Early modern European intellectual history; Renaissance science and culture
Rudy Singer Visiting Associate Professor of German University of Göttingen; Guest Professor, Kiel University	singerr@umn.edu	Literature & poetics of the "Goethezeit" & around 1900; European drama, theater, & theater theory; word & image relations; rhetoric & literature; parody & literary nonsense
Igor Tchoukarine Assistant Professor History	itchouka@umn.edu	20th c. history of Central and Southeastern Europe; history of tourism and travel; the Cold War; international institutions; maritime cultures and identities; migration; transnational history
Brian Vetruba Librarian European Studies & Digital Scholarship	bvetruba@umn.edu	European history, languages, and literatures; digital humanities
Christophe Wall-Romana Professor French	wallr007@umn.edu	Modern European critical theory and philosophy; modern poetry; translation studies
Peter Wells Professor Anthropology	wells001@umn.edu	Archaeology of Europe-Bronze Age through early medieval; archaeological excavations in Bavaria; visual culture in prehistoric Europe; interaction and trade between societies; practice of ritual

Faculty Emeriti

Name	Contact	Specialties
Poul Houe Professor Emeritus Cand. mag., Aarhus University	houex001@umn.edu	Modern Danish and Swedish literature; European humanism; travel and exile literature
Ruth-Ellen B Joeres Professor Emerita PhD, Johns Hopkins	joere001@umn.edu	German women's literary, social and cultural history of the18th-20th centuries; feminist/gender theories; cultural studies
Richard McCormick Professor Emeritus PhD, University of California-Berkeley	mccor001@umn.edu	German film studies and film history; 20th-century German literature; feminism and gender studies
Charlotte Melin Professor Emerita PhD, University of Michigan-Ann Arbor	melin005@umn.edu	Postwar German poetry; second-language acquisition; transnational literary relations; environmental humanities
James A. Parente, Jr. Professor Emeritus PhD, Yale University	paren001@umn.edu	Medieval and early modern German, Netherlandic, and Scandinavian literature and culture
Arlene Teraoka Professor Emerita PhD, Stanford University	terao001@umn.edu	20th-century and minority German literature; German intellectual history; cultural criticism
Ray Wakefield Associate Professor Emeritus PhD, Indiana University	wakef001@umn.edu	Second-language acquisition; medieval German literature; Dutch
Monika Zagar Professor Emerita PhD, University of California-Berkeley	zagar001@umn.edu	Norwegian language & literature; modernism; Scandinavian women writers
Jack Zipes Professor Emeritus PhD, Columbia University	zipes001@umn.edu	Fairy tales; 20th-century literature; German, GDR, women's and Jewish studies