Graduate

For a more detailed look at our graduate students please click on their photos:

Timothy Attanucci

Timothy Attanucci, Ph.D. candidate in German and a member of the PhD-Net “Das Wissen der Literatur,” studied German and comparative literature at Harvard (B.A.), Tübingen, and Paris IV – Sorbonne (M.A.). With a focus on the works of Adalbert Stifter, his dissertation, Stories from Earth: A. Stifter’s Geopoetics, analyses the poetics of scientific and literary knowledge of the earth in the 19th century. His publications include articles and conference presentations on Kafka, Stifter, Flaubert, and R. Walser. Research and teaching interests: German literature since the 18th century; history of science and technology; media theory; digital humanities; philosophies of history; material culture and memory; Austrian literature. Attanucci is currently (AY 2011-12) a guest doctoral student at the Friedrich Schlegel Graduiertenschule für Literaturwissenschaftliche Studien, FU-Berlin.

Matthew Birkhold

Matthew H. Birkhold received his B.A. in German Literature and Cultural History from Columbia University in 2008. As a dual-degree candidate at Columbia Law School and Princeton University, Matthew completed his first year of law school before joining the German Department in 2009. Matthew will graduate with his J.D. in May, 2014. Currently, Matthew is writing a dissertation on fan fiction and intellectual property in 18th-century Germany. Additional research interests include: art and cultural property law; Federal Indian Law; German literature, especially the period around 1800; Russian literature; Psychoanalysis. In addition to encyclopedia entries on Indian Law and US legal history, Matthew has published articles on international cultural patrimony, Native American law, and Prussian jurisprudence in the works of Heinrich von Kleist.

Alice Christensen

Alice Christensen has been a graduate student in the German Department since the fall of 2010. She previously studied German literature in Baltimore and Berlin and epidemiology in New Haven. Her research interests include: German literature and thought from the 18th century to the present; history of science and medicine; probability theory; film.

Daniel Fehr

Daniel Fehr is a Ph.D. candidate at the German Department and a freelance artist. Before he joined the program in 2008 he studied photography at the Zurich University of the Arts and the School of Visual Arts in New York. His academic research interests include interrelations between literature and religion from the 18th to 20th century and the knowledge respectively authority of literature; culture practices, especially techniques of reading and writing; media theory and the history of philology. Particularly, he studies cultural constellations in which media or media based operation hold a constitutive function for the subject. His dissertation, “Writing Conversion: Religious and Political Conversions in German Modernity,” is situated in this context. Fehr is currently (AY 2011-12) an guest doctoral student at the ETH, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich.

Mladen Gladić

Mladen Gladić received an MA in German Literature, Philosophy, and Political Science from the University of Cologne. After research positions at the Sonderforschungsbereich Medien und kulturelle Kommunikation, Cologne and the NCCR Iconic Criticism: The Power and Meaning of Images (eikones), Basel, he joined the graduate program of the German Department in Spring 2008. In 2010 Mladen was a guest researcher at Bauhaus Universität, Weimar (Internationales Kolleg für Kulturtechnikforschung und Medienphilosophie, IKKM). He has coordinated the Princeton-Weimar Summer School for Media Studies since 2011. Mladen has published articles on Adorno, Jean-Luc Nancy, Kant, and Benjamin, and is currently writing a dissertation on the media genre of war reporting, from William Howard Russel to Peter Handke, and from Johann Wolfgang Goethe to warblogging. Together with Christoph Engemann (Weimar), he is editing an English language reader on German Media Studies.

Hannah Hunter-Parker

Hannah Hunter-Parker is a Ph.D. candidate in the German Department in her second year. Before coming to Princeton, she received her B.A. in German Literature and the History of Art & Architecture from Middlebury College in 2010. Present research interests include: Late medieval and early modern Germanic cultures; the Artusepik and courtly romance; reading practices, past and present; text-image space in manuscripts; media and meaning; and nineteenth- and twentieth-century receptions of medieval culture. Hannah is currently a Graduate Student Fellow at the university, co-hosting a weekly German-language table for undergraduate students.

Christian Jany

Christian Jany is a Ph.D. student, and his main interests are phenomenology, aesthetics, and literature and music of the Long 19th Century. Before joining Princeton’s German Department, he studied Neuere deutsche Literatur and Kulturwissenschaft at the Humboldt University of Berlin, where he obtained a Magister degree in 2010. His dissertation, advised by Brigid Doherty and Claudia Brodsky, investigates the relationship of sense perception and narrative apperception in 19th century theory and literature. He has published on Kafka’s style of writing.

Alana King

Alana King is a Ph.D. candidate completing a dissertation on mysticism in early modern Germany (16th & 17th centuries), entitled Mysticism & Confessional Conflict in Post-Reformation Germany: The Mystical Theology of Valentin Weigel (1533-1588), advised by Prof. Sara Poor. Other research interests include medievalism (early modern perspectives on the Middle Ages), medieval & early modern historiography, philology, religious activism & quietism, & medieval mystical writers. Alana is also the Assistant to the Director of the German Dept’s Summer Work Program, a program that connects Princeton undergraduates with internships in Germany.

Jeffrey Kirkwood

Jeffrey Kirkwood is a Ph.D. candidate in the German Department and recipient of a Fulbright Grant to Germany (AY 2011-2012) where he is presently a Visiting Junior Fellow at the Internationales Kolleg für Kulturtechnikforschung und Medienphilosophie (IKKM). He is writing a dissertation on logics of continuity in early cinema and experimental psychology in Germany during the late 19th and early 20th and centuries. Additional research interests include: Media theory and history, German philosophy, history of science, and film.

Peter Kuras

Peter Kuras is currently completing a dissertation arguing that theories of law played a crucial role in the formative years of the cinema. His other research interests include concepts of human deficiency, fiction as an epistemological tool, medial historiography, the historiography of media, and the history of style in academic writing. In addition to his studies at Princeton, Peter has studied at the University of Chicago and as a guest doctoral student at the Friedrich Schlegel Graduiertenschule für Literaturwissenschaftliche Studien, FU-Berlin

Jonathan S. Martin

Jonathan S. Martin is a PhD. candidate in the German Department in his first year. He received his BA in German, Medieval Studies, and Classics from the University of Michigan in 2010 and an MA in Medieval and Renaissance Studies from the University of Freiburg, Germany, in 2012. His research interests are centered around medieval German literature and culture, with a special interest in medieval understandings of historical and fictional writing. Other interests include cultural transfer and multilingualism, law and literature, the medieval reception of classical antiquity, and the reception and cultural understanding of the Middle Ages in Germany from the eighteenth century to the present.

Julian Petri

Julian Petri is a second-year graduate student in Princeton’s German Department and is currently studying Kleist, Nietzsche, and Musil. Before coming to Princeton, he pursued a variety of interests in social theory, political philosophy, and intellectual history at Deep Springs College, Harvard University, and King’s College, Cambridge. He’s also involved in Princeton’s Prison Teaching Initiative, currently co-teaching a course on twentieth-century American literature

Tanvi Solanki

Tanvi Solanki is a fourth year graduate student in the Department of German. She received her B.A. in Comparative Literature and Germanic Studies from the University of Chicago (2008) and her M.A. from Princeton University (2011). She is currently (AY 2012-3) visiting scholar at the Phd-Net “Wissen der Literatur” at Humboldt University in Berlin. She is working on a dissertation with the working title “Style and Physiology: Training a New Reading Subject from Herder to Humboldt 1764-1836.” Her research focuses on the following paths of inquiry: the discourse of the pathological, its techniques, and its relation to the ‘aesthetic’ from 17th-20th century literature, medicine and philosophy; the history of reading as cultural technique; the history of prosody and verse forms; 18th century oral and acoustic techniques in rhetoric; declamations; material cultures of the Enlightenment and the Gelehrtenrepublik; practices of textual circulation, translation across medial boundaries; Sanskrit’s function for German philology.

Mareike Stoll

Mareike Stoll has been a doctoral student in the Department of German at Princeton since 2008, and has completed her M.A. in 2011. Currently a guest doctoral student at the ZfL (Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung) in Berlin, she focuses on research for her doctoral thesis. Her dissertation will be on forms of reading, especially in regard to photo books, albums, and other forms of picture books in 1920s Germany. Before coming to Princeton, she completed her M.A. (Magistra Artium) in Comparative Literature at Freie Universität Berlin and in Art History at Humboldt Universität zu Berlin in 2005, and worked in a gallery specialized in photography from 2005 to the summer of 2008. She has published and publicly presented on the following topics: Walter Benjamin’s notion of guilt and the crime scene, conditions of emptiness in the photography of Michael Schmidt, and contemporary color photography by Jitka Hanzlová and Joachim Brohm.