Presenter Bios

All bios are organized in chronological order of presentation.

Chaoge Wang, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Chaoge Wang is a graduate student in the Germanic Languages and Literatures at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she also received her master’s degree in Comparative and World Literature. Her research interests include German 19th- and 20th-century literature, intellectual history, psychology, philosophy, and comparative studies in Chinese and Anglophone Literatures.

Mads Larsen, UCLA Mads Larsen is a PhD candidate at the University of California, Los Angeles, and a research postdoc at the University of Oslo. Two dozen of his articles have been published in ranked journals. His dissertation, Evolution Toward Social Democracy in a Millennium of Nordic Fiction, illuminates the cultural origins of Scandinavian egalitarianism. Larsen’s current project is to develop an evolutionary approach to well-being, conducting qualitative empirical research on the Covid pandemic and Ukraine refugee crisis.

Andrew Blough, UC Berkeley is a PhD student in the German department at UC Berkeley. They joined the department in 2019 after receiving an M.A. in Philosophy from Duquesne University that year. Along with a specialization in critical theory, they are interested most generally in semiosis in its theological, political, and symbolic registers. More specifically, this involves what they are framing as an aesthetic historicity of morality, in other words, the moral register of aesthetic practices of self-fashioning - thus the present interest in Musil’s gestures toward an experimental ethics in his aesthetic treatment of the gulf between morality and representability.

Ben Seyfert, UCLA Andréas-Benjamin Seyfert is a PhD Candidate in the German section of the Department of European Languages and Transcultural Studies at UCLA. He is currently conducting doctoral research in Europe as a Leo Baeck Institute Fellow. His publications include "Goethe lebt! Der Dichter als Filmgestalt" for Wallstein Verlag in 2016 and, more recently, "Banning Jewishness: Stefan Zweig, Robert Siodmak, and the Nazis" for Berghahn Books. In addition to his dissertation on the lost films of the late Weimar Republic, Ben has many projects in the pipeline, including two large-scale digitizations of historical periodicals, a print volume about exile director Wilhelm Thiele co-edited with Chris Horak (exp. 2023) and a chapter for Aesthetics in Transition, an upcoming book at Bloomsbury Academic.

Nikoleta Perić, University of Debrecen, Hungary Nikoleta Perić is a first-year PhD student at the Doctoral School of Literary and Cultural Studies at the University of Debrecen, Hungary. She defended her Master's thesis entitled Photography in the Work of W. G. Sebald at the Károli Gáspár University of the Reformed Church in Budapest, Hungary. She is particularly interested in the concept of collecting, especially the works of Adalbert Stifter and W.G. Sebald.

Caleb Davis, Ohio State University Caleb is a second-year PhD student at the Ohio State University where he studies the intersections of nationalism, narrative, and visual communication. He is currently preparing a dissertation that investigates narrative production through visual imagery in German children’s picture books written in the late Weimar- and early Nazi periods. Additionally, he is currently working on a book translation of the memoirs of a German-Polish refugee, Gisela Steinbach, that narrates her experiences during and after the second World War.

Vanessa Awa, University of Missouri Vanessa Awa is a PhD Candidate in the School of Languages, Literatures, and cultures at the University of Missouri-Columbia, where she also teaches French as a Graduate Teaching Assistant (GTA). She is the current Vice-President of African Graduate Professional Student Association (AGPSA), a current Student Employee Advisor at the Career Center Mizzou, and a former Deaton Scholar. Vanessa’s research interests are in Sociolinguistics language variation, media, and cultural studies (popular cultures), identity and francophone cultures in West Africa. Her current research focuses on African French dialects, Social media, Music and Sub-Saharan Francophone Africa. She focuses on theorizing the global diffusion of new dialects of French—through the lens of social media use and music. Vanessa likes traveling and discovery, culinary art and community service.

Betsy Carter, University of Arizona

Betsy Carter is a student in the Interdisciplinary Ph.D. program in Second Language Acquisition and Teaching (SLAT) at the University of Arizona. In May 2021, she completed a master's degree in German studies at the University of Colorado Boulder. Prior to that, she earned her bachelor's degree at Brown University, majoring in music and comparative literature with an honors thesis in literary translation. She has taught German classes in her role as a teaching assistant at Brown, CU, and UA. In her graduate work, she is interested in how to enact creative writing and literary translation practices in the language classroom and how aspects of identity affects students' experiences learning a new language and culture.

Léa Fougerolle, University of Louisiana at Lafayette Léa Fougerolle is a first year Ph.D. student in the French and Francophone Studies department at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. She graduated from the Université de Lorraine in Nancy, France, earning a B.A. in Cultural Studies with a Minor in Cultural Mediation and Youth Literature (2014-2017). She also studied for three years at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris, France, where she earned an M.A. in Sociology (2017-2020). In 2019-2020, she was also a Fulbright Language Assistant of French at Ursinus College, Pennsylvania, where she assisted in teaching French language and culture at the college level for a year.

She is now a Doctoral Fellow at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette where she studies the topic of sensory experiences in 20th and 21st century French and Belgian texts. Among her academic interests are experimental and immersive literature, the way literature approaches environmental issues, as well as smellscapes and the writing of olfactory experiences.

Akshita Sharma, Delhi University I have received my bachelor's degree in German studies from the Department of Germanic and Romance Studies of the Delhi University in the year 2019, which I followed up with pursuing delf A1 and Delf A2 in French at Alliance française de Delhi. I am currently pursuing my master's degree in German Studies at the University of Delhi, in which my research topic for my thesis is ‚,Literary representation of Interculturality and Experience of Foreignness in the works of Rafik Schami“. I have also completed the C1 course in 2021 at Goethe-Institut Pune. In addition, I have participated at Humboldt University from 19 July, 2021 to 13 August as a DAAD scholar in a regional and cultural studies course, at the B1-B2 level of CEF as part of the summer university. I have also participated in a 4 months Business Translation course, which is offered by University of Mumbai under the framework of Community of Practice Interculturalism and Literary Theory. My research interests include German Literature of Migration, Intercultural literature, Postcolonialism in German literature, Rafik Schami and Emine Sevgi Özdamar.

Todd Maslyk, University of Michigan Todd Maslyk is a PhD candidate in the department of Germanic Languages and Literatures at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. His research interests focus on the nature of the knowledge exchange relationship between Germany and Japan running from 19th through the 20th centuries, in particular the connections among legal scholars in both countries and the way that their work embedded into the German-Japanese cultural imaginary. He also works on the nature of ekphrasis, fascist aesthetics, and the history of science.

Vincent Kancans, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities Vincent is a PhD candidate in the Department of German, Nordic, Slavic & Dutch at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. His main research areas are German media theory, sound studies, and game studies. He has also worked as a translator of German and Russian. His dissertation project investigates the cultural nostalgia for magnetic tape as an outdated medium, as well as reappropriations of tape and other media by consumers.

Lujun Guo, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Lujun is currently a PhD student in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her research interests include 18. and 19. Century German literature, world mythology and folktales, and cultural memory studies. Lujun is writing a dissertation on German fairy tales by Goethe, Tieck, and the Brothers Grimm at this moment.

Jacqueline Davis, UCLA Jackie is a Ph.D. candidate in the World Arts and Cultures/Dance department at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Her research focuses on avant-garde German/Jewish modern dancer Valeska Gert (1892-1978), her performance spaces both in Germany and the United States, and the forms of sociality (and non-sociality) that she cultivated through her artistic practices. Overall, Jackie’s research evaluates dance and the production of subversive body politics. Jackie has received extramural awards from the Fulbright U.S. Student Program, Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD), Leo Baeck Institute, the University for Music and Dance Cologne, and the German Studies Association. She was also awarded intramural fellowships from UCLA's Graduate Division, the Center for the Study of Women, the Center for European and Russian Studies, the Leve Center, and the Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy. Jackie had a previous life as an experimental filmmaker and visual artist. Her work has been screened internationally and she has published a number of artist books. Jackie holds B.A. degrees in Dance and History as well as an M.A. in Culture and Performance.

Miranda Heaner, University of Louisiana at Lafayette Miranda Heaner is a first-year M.A. student in French at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, where she works as a Graduate Research Assistant at the Center for Louisiana Studies. She is originally from Los Angeles and received her B.A. (honors) in French and International Studies from Northwestern University in 2019. Her current research interests include the Alsatian influence on the development of Cajun culture, the origins of rural Mardi Gras traditions, and descriptions of liminality and ritual in medieval literature.

Katya Lopatko, UCSB Katya Lopatko is a graduate student in the Comparative Literature program at University of California, Santa Barbara. Her research interests focus on French and English modern and contemporary literature, urban and spatial studies, materialism and aesthetics, feminist and queer theory, and critical theory and cultural studies. She is currently writing her Master’s thesis on domestic space as social space in French and English Modernist literature. Her journalism and creative writing have appeared in a variety of publications, and she is working on her first book of fiction.

Kelly Roso, UCLA Kelly Roso is a Candidate of Philosophy (C.Phil) in the Italian section of UCLA’s Department of European Languages and Transcultural Studies. She holds Masters degrees from both UCLA and from the Sorbonne University in Paris. Her dissertation examines radical dwelling in modern and contemporary Italian women’s literature. She is also the co-owner of Oddflower Creations, an artisanal jewelry and homeware boutique, alongside one of today’s talented conference organizers, another almost-doctor, Amber Sackett.