Adam Oberlin

Adam Oberlin, Senior Lecturer in the Department of German, received his PhD in Germanic Studies from the University of Minnesota in 2012 and has taught topics in linguistics, Germanic languages, Latin, medieval and modern literature, European history, and world geography to students ranging from middle school grades to graduate school in secondary schools, universities, and adult educational institutes since 2007. His research and teaching interests include historical and corpus linguistics, digital approaches to textual analysis, and content-based instruction. Recently published or forthcoming articles cover topics such as non-canonical subject marking in Germanic, diachronic approaches to phraseological research in German, the vocabulary of sensory disability and weather phenomena in Middle High German, medieval reception history in black metal, and approaches to periodization in language and literary history.

Alongside teaching courses such as GER 1025, 105, 107, 207, and 208, he is currently the language coordinator for second- and third-year courses, supervising graduate student AIs in language teaching and working across university programs and centers to develop intermediate and advanced curricula, most recently with the aid of grants from the 250th Anniversary Fund for Innovation in Undergraduate Education and the Center for Digital Humanities. Building on the pedagogical core of his colleague Jamie Rankin’s lauded first-year curriculum, he is currently developing new corpus-based approaches to frequency vocabulary and reading comprehension in advanced and intermediate language courses, including a focus on phraseological/polylexical vocabulary and conducting student-led metalinguistic research and analysis as a capstone course component.

Among other roles, he is also the current Academic Director of the Princeton-in-Munich program, the Princeton liaison and a language evaluator for the Berlin Consortium for German Studies, and the language placement and evaluation officer for the department. Outside of the Department of German he is an officer in the Society for Medieval Germanic Studies and MLA LSL Germanic Philology, and member of several other professional societies, as well as the digital editor for New Norse Studies and an active reviewer and referee for publications such as Digital Philology, JEGP, Mediävisitik, The Medieval Review, and Year’s Work in Modern Language Studies.