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German Graduate Students

Luke Beller

Luke Beller

Luke Beller received his BA in Classics and MA in German Studies at California State University, Long Beach. He began his PhD in German at Johns Hopkins in Fall 2020. As a recipient of the 2020-2021 Fulbright Research Award, he conducted a study of the figure of Socrates and the philosophical concept of cosmopolitism in Bertolt Brecht’s Geschichten vom Herrn Keuner at the Bertolt Brecht Archiv in Berlin. His broader research interests include the 18th and early 19th century drama and aesthetic theory, the intersections between German Enlightenment philosophy and Ancient Greek thought—specifically the evolution of the concept of happiness, philosophy and literature of rebellion and revolution from Friedrich Schiller to Bertolt Brecht, and the traditions of global justice and international human rights as they developed from the political histories of Germany and the United States.

Gargi Dargan

Gargi Dargan

Gargi Dargan has completed her BA Hons. German and has been the Gold medalist in MA in German Studies from the University of Delhi in 2021. She has attended multiple summer courses offered by ISU Fulda, Heidelberg Universität. Her Master’s thesis centers around the notion of anthropocentrism and the way it has been challenged through the depiction of nonhuman figures in the texts of Franz Kafka. Her research interests include the perspectives on the representation of nonhuman animals in Indian as well as German Literature. Complementary to this, she tends to be interested in bringing forth postcolonial feminism, thereby collaborating it with her area of expertise. Before joining Johns Hopkins, she worked as a Guest Lecturer at the University of Delhi in 2021. 

Herve Djapo

Hervé Djapo

Hervé Djapo is a Germanist whose episteme has been acquired in various French, English and German-speaking universities in Africa and Europe. He began his studies at the Université Félix Houphouet-Boigny of Abidjan (UFHB) where he obtained his Bachelor’s degree in Germanic Studies with one of the highest marks. Following this brilliant performance, he obtained several DAAD scholarships in Stuttgart, Berlin, Oldenburg, and also in Nairobi (University of Nairobi) where he earned his Master’s degree in Germanic Studies in 2020, as an exchange student at the Universität Paderborn (Germany), with the best possible grade “Grade A”. His field of research includes a comparative study between Old and New German literature which he conducted during the BA, modern German language literature dealing with German colonialism and the various aesthetic literary techniques that accompany it, such as Christian Kracht’s controversial novel IMPERIUM that he discussed in MA as a discourse contribution. His current doctoral dissertation focuses on Ich-Literatur, New Subjectivity, Pop-Literature and the Constructions of the Self in contemporary German-language literature.

Glen Gray

Glen Gray

Glen Gray received an M.A. in German Studies in 2020 and a B.A. in German Studies and a B.M. in Music Composition from California State University, Long Beach (CSULB) in 2017. In 2017, he received a Fulbright Austria English Teaching Assistant position to teach in Vienna. Glen was awarded a DAAD research grant in 2019 to fund a research stay at the Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn, where completed his thesis on nineteenth century operatic adaptations of Kleist’s Das Käthchen von Heilbronn. He will continue his study of literary reception through operatic adaptation at Johns Hopkins. Glen is also a composer of electronic music and co-founder of the Los Angeles Electroacoustic Ensemble. Glen has premiered compositions at the 2019 “Oh My Ears” music festival, and in the 2019 production 13 Fruitcakes at LaMaMa Experimental Theater Club in New York. This summer, the LAEE has been presenting virtual concerts via ZOOM.

KSAS

Antonia Grousdanidou

Antonia Grousdanidou holds degrees in philosophy and history of art. Her dissertation explores literary uses of urban space in German-language crime narratives of the interwar period (in fiction and documentary genres), while examining early 20th-century aesthetic and scientific discourses through the lens of crime/criminality.  

headshot of Brad Harmon

Brad Harmon

Brad Harmon joined the programs in German Literature and Thought and Cinema and Media Studies at Johns Hopkins University in 2020 after previously earning an MA in Scandinavian Languages & Literatures from the University of Washington and a BA in German, Scandinavian & Dutch from the University of Minnesota. His dissertation research focuses on literary-philosophical representations of respiration and rhythm of modernity, particularly since Rilke. General research interests include phenomenology and existentialism; philosophies of time, truth, and translation; environmental studies, materiality, and (inter)corporeality; queer theory; and (the ethics of) aesthetic experience. He is also active as a literary translator from Swedish, German, and (occasionally) Danish and Norwegian. In 2021 he was invited to attend the translation workshop Översättargruvan in Sweden and in 2022 he was selected as an Emerging Translator Mentorship fellow for Swedish by the American Literary Translator’s Association. Authors he’s translated include Monika Fagerholm, Katarina Frostenson, Jila Mossaed, Birgitta Trotzig, Rilke, Nelly Sachs, Christa Wolf, Theis Ørntoft and Roskva Koritzinsky.

Jiantong Liao

Jiantong Liao

Jiantong Liao joined the program in German Literature and Thought in 2023 after studying at Humboldt University in Berlin and earning a BA in Comparative Literature and German at the University of California, Irvine. His current research focus areas include the criticism of capitalism, the concept of alienation, capitalism in relation to the development of infrastructure and everyday life. He is particularly interested in Martin Heidegger, Karl Marx, and the Frankfurt School. During his undergraduate years, he conducted research on East German identity and Kafka’s Metamorphosis in relation to Heidegger’s concept of animality. For his honors thesis, Jiantong wrote about the affinities between Heidegger’s and Marx’s views on modern technology in relation to the living experience of human beings.

Danmin (Demi) Liu

Demi Liu received her BA degrees in German, Romance Languages (with specialization in French and Italian), Cognitive Science, and a minor in philosophy from Johns Hopkins University in 2023.  Her BA honors thesis “Sauver l’humanité une analyse de Der Besuch der alten Dame et Rhinocéros comme tragicomedies” studies post-WWII social dynamics, especially the conflicts between the individual and the collective through tragicomic theater in both French and German.  Her backgrounds in language acquisition and computational linguistics have contributed to her research interests in post-modernist and experimental literature, narrative transmediality and intermediality, as well as literary multilingualism.

Bidyum Medhi

Bidyum Medhi

Bidyum Medhi is interested in exploring comparative perspectives on nature and the non-human world, in terms of animals and animality, wilderness and landscape, conservation and preservation. He examines the ways in which this relation shapes and reshapes new eco-literary trends in the two literary cultures of Assamese and German. His research focuses on the literary representation of the non-human animal, the spaces animals occupy in society and culture, and the human-animal interactions and seeks to explore various aspects of the animal turn in contemporary literary trends. He is trained in German language and literature and holds Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in German Studies from Jawaharlal Nehru University New Delhi. His M.Phil dissertation, titled ‘The Eco-Discourse with Reference to Monika Maron’s Flugasche,’ attempted to examine the notions of progress, technology and heroism inherent in Maron’s work. He also worked as Assistant Professor at Tezpur University, Assam from 2014-2017 in the department of English and Foreign Languages. 

Lisa Schmitz

Lisa Schmitz

Lisa Schmitz is a PhD student in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures. Her fields of interest include modernist to contemporary literature and film as well as literary theory and the intersections of philosophy and literature. In addition to her academic work, she is also interested in innovative strategies to communicate literature and art to a broader audience. Since 2019, she has been working as an assistant for the Literaturhaus Augsburg. Prior to coming to Johns Hopkins, she earned a BA in Philosophy and German Studies from the University of Duisburg-Essen and an MA in German Studies from the University of Connecticut where she also completed a Certificate in Human Rights. 

Almut Slizyk

Almut Slizyk

As a PhD Candidate in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures, Almut Slizyk has concentrated on theories of reading and writing, German modernism, German Jewish literature and culture (with a particular interest in Margarete Susman) as well as theories of authorship and aesthetics. Her dissertation, “Lese-Zeichen: Scenes and Signs of Obstructed Reading in Austrian German Fiction around 1900,”focuses on material and processual aspects of discontinuous reading in Arthur Schnitzler, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Stefan Zweig’s prose with particular attention to how these texts reflect on reading as an artform itself and a delicate cultural practice. She has taught German as a foreign language from the beginning to the advanced levels and has been a visiting scholar at the Universities of Bonn, Marburg, and Cologne. With the support of the American Friends of Marbach, she pursued archival research at the German Literature Archive (DLA) Marbach. Previously, she held a position as Visiting DAAD Language Assistant at the University of Washington and completed a two-year teacher certification for the subjects German, Italian, and English at the middle and high school levels in Bavaria. Almutholds an M.A. in Italian, English, and German Language and Literature from the University of Würzburg, Germany. During her master’s program she also studied with a Bilateral Education Agreement Scholarship at the University of Padova, Italy. Her master’s thesis entitled “Cupiditas, Timor, Laetitia, Tristitia, and Ira. On the Formation and Representation of Emotions in Dante’s Vita Nova” was devoted to the connections between encoded emotions and forms of modern subjectivity in the late Middle Ages.

Shengshuang Wang

Shengshuang Wang

Shengshuang Wang holds a bachelor’s degree in Chinese Language and Literature from Nanjing University, and she received her master’s degree in Comparative Literature from Renmin University of China. In 2020 she was accepted into the Interdisciplinary Humanistic Studies Program to combine her interests in German studies and Sinology. Her research focuses on the influences of German literature and philosophy on Chinese modernity, especially on Chinese intellectual and political movements in the 20th century. Shengshuang also continues her investigations on the contemporary German writer W. G. Sebald, especially the theme of repetition in his works.

Tegan White-Nesbitt

Tegan White-Nesbitt

Tegan White-Nesbitt earned her B.A. in linguistics with a minor in music at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks in 2016. She completed her M.A. in German studies at California State University, Long Beach in 2018. She entered the German program at Johns Hopkins in the Fall of 2018. Her research interests include translation studies, literary theory, genre theory, Jewish language and culture, and the history of poetic forms.

Photo of Anna Wollenschläger

Anna Wollenschläger

Anna Wollenschläger received her MA in German Literature and Philosophy from the University of Hamburg on the concept of Non-Identity in Nietzsche and Adorno. Her interests are situated at the intersection of philosophy and literature and include psychoanalytic approaches as well as gender and sexuality studies with a particular emphasis on the political and social-political dimensions of experimental writing and its significant part in generating alternative formations of knowledge. Further research interests are the notion of “Nature” in German Literature and Philosophy from 17th century on, contemporary theater studies and early Romantic’s Philosophy. For her dissertation project, Anna envisions exploring the figure of “multi-dimensionality” in thinking and writing, with regard for philosophical as well as cognitive sciences considerations.