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.

Sarah Eldridge

Sarah Vandegrift Eldridge is a doctoral student in the German Department whose research interests focus on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century German literature, particularly the genre of the novel. Her dissertation, titled Conceiving Generation: The Novel and the Nuclear Family around 1800, is advised by Joseph Vogl, Brigid Doherty, and Christiane Frey and will be defended in June 2012. Further research interests include the question of addressee or audience in literary work, religious writing as an antecedent to the novel, and techniques of ‘care of the self.’

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.

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.

Michael J. McGillen

Michael McGillen is a Ph.D. Candidate currently completing a dissertation entitled “Towards an Endless History: Problems of Eschatology in Germany, 1920-1938.” A recipient of DAAD scholarships for research in Germany in 2005-2006 and 2009-2010, and a Charlotte Elizabeth Procter Honorific Fellowship for the 2011-2012 academic year, he has research interests in 20th century German literature (modern German poetry and poetics, German theater, and post-war German literature); in German philosophy from Kant to Heidegger; in literary theory and aesthetics (Benjamin, Auerbach); in theories of historiography; and in the history of religion and theology in Germany.

Tanvi Solanki

Tanvi Solanki is a third 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 (2012). She is currently working on a dissertation on reading disorders (or ‘pathologies’) troubling the distinction between the individual and the collective – such as Schwärmerei, autodidacticism, and Lesesucht – and their staging, disciplining and regulation in autobiographical and medical texts from the late eighteenth century to the early nineteenth. Her research focuses on the following paths of inquiry: the discourse of the pathological, its techniques, and its relation to the ‘aesthetic’ in Romantic literature, medicine and philosophy; the history of reading practices, Enlightenment Orientalism, economics and affect, laws of form, of architectonics and their subversion; practices of textual circulation, translation and the paratext across medial boundaries. She has recently been a recipient of the Donald and Mary Hyde (Summer 2012) and DAAD (AY 2012-13) fellowships.

Petra Spies

Petra Spies is a Ph.D. Candidate completing her dissertation, Original Compiler: Notation as Textual Practice in Theodor Fontane (directed by Professor Nikolaus Wegmann). Her research interests include 19th-century German literature and culture, the material history of creativity, poetics ‘around 1800,’ and media history. She currently holds a Mellon / ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship and is Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes alumna. Before coming to Princeton, Petra studied Europäische Medienwissenschaft at the Universität Potsdam, the Fachhochschule Potsdam, and the Filmhochschule “Konrad Wolf” (B.A., 2005) and Intellectual History and the History of Political Thought at the University of Sussex, England (M.A., 2006). Since 2010, she is an associated member of the Fontane-Arbeitsstelle at the Georg-August-Universität Göttingen to edit the Fontane volume Aus England for the Große Brandenburger Fontane-Ausgabe (eds. Heinrich Detering and Gabriele Radecke).

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.