Karein Goertz (RC German Program Head) is a native Berliner who has been teaching in the German and Arts & Ideas in the Humanities programs at the Residential College since 1999. She received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of Texas Austin where she first began teaching as a graduate student.  As a language teacher, Karein was trained in the communicative method and has enjoyed teaching German to generations of students, from absolute beginners to advanced students.  Her teaching is continuously being shaped by ongoing research, evolving technology, changes in the world and in students, as well as yearly travels to Germany.  Beyond the German program, she has taught English-language seminars on the Holocaust, cities, walking, refugee narratives, and literary translation.

Karein's doctoral research explored the ethical and aesthetic issues raised by Holocaust literature as memory shifts from lived to imagined experience. Since then, she has published articles on transgenerational representations of the Holocaust, including the work of Anne Frank, Charlotte Delbo, Ruth Klüger, Jurek Becker and Henri Raczymow. Karein has also written about identity and language play in Afro- and Turkish-German and Francophone literature (May Ayim, Zehra Cirak, Leila Houari); about Berlin as imagined city (from Walter Benjamin to Tom Tykwer); and about walking as philosophy and pedagogy. Most recently, she has published a personal essay that examines the after-effects of gun violence.  Broadly speaking, Karein is interested in the power of the arts—literature, poetry, visual art, music, and film—to document and transform experiences of loss and dislocation. The arts are also a means to foster creative and meaningful community and to celebrate the transcendent in the ordinary. Nowadays, Karein's research is driven by a desire to develop new courses that address issues of our time: resilience in the time of climate crisis and pandemic; exile and refugeedom; translation and third-culture identity; modernity and the urban experience; literary salons, creative collaboration and the art of conversation; walking as an antidote to the culture of speed, distraction, consumption and virtuality. 

In 2020, Karein became head of the RC German Program. She seeks to continue the excellent track-record of German language instruction, to build on the program's long history of engagement with cultural issues through German-language literature and art, and to take the program in a direction that makes sense for today's students who face 21st century opportunities and challenges. The program is designed to foster an appreciation for German literature and culture, past and present, while working towards and beyond proficiency. We also promote learning across the curriculum as students make connections between German and other fields of study. 

Carla Cribari-Assali is a native German speaker from Heidelberg who first joined the RC faculty in 2019. With her Lebanese-German background and advanced degrees from Germany and Scotland, she brings a uniquely international perspective to our students.  Carla is an experienced teacher who has taught German, as well as Anthropology and English, in various academic and non-academic contexts.

With her training as a cultural anthropologist, Carla has made an outstanding contribution to cross-cultural studies and the Sociology of Childhood. For her doctoral degree, Carla conducted ethnographic research on the well-being of children in Germany and of Tibetan refugees in India. She also did field research with the Bena tribe in the highlands of Papua New Guinea. Her interest in cross-cultural comparison and multiculturalism shape her classes, where she teaches language in the context of culture, bringing it alive and making the learning experience more fun.

Carla has also been active in theater. For over ten years, she directed music theater productions in Heidelberg that often dealt with socially relevant issues, such as human trafficking.  She taught acting to adults, youth and children, and hopes to incorporate theater into her teaching at the RC. In her free time Carla likes to garden and farm at White Lotus Farms.

Louise-Hélène, Lecturer in RC French and Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literature, is the most recent addition to our program. She has a PhD in Literary Studies from the Université du Québec à Montreal and Université des Saarlandes, and is fluent in both French and German. Louise-Hélène's interests include modern and contemporary Franco-German cultural and literary relations, as well as 20th and 21st century Québec Literature. Her research and teaching focus on cross-cultural issues, including migration narratives, theories of cross-cultural communication, intertextuality, reception and comparative studies. Other interests include car culture, that is, iconic cars as intracultural and transcultural mediators of identity, motivational theories of emotions, and affective communities. In the RC German program, she teaches a Readings course on German graphic novels and migration.