Ph.D., Lecturer of German
Education
Ph.D., University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2019
Personal Statement
In 2007, I received my BA in German Language from Guilford College in Greensboro North Carolina. Upon graduation, I was granted the opportunity to spend two years in Austria as a Fulbright language assistant. During my stay in Austria, my interests took a turn towards brewing. Three years later, I started working at Natty Greene’s Brewing by scrubbing the floors. After brewing and reading the novels of Hermann Hesse and Thomas Mann for two years, I decided to pursue a graduate degree in German. It wasn’t immediately clear to me that my interest would be in literature but that turned out to be the case. I received my Master’s by reworking a paper about the similarities between Jakob Heym from Jurek Becker’s Jakob der Lügner and various understandings of the messiahs. My dissertation is about Jakob Arjouni’s hard-boiled detective, Kemal Kayankaya. Among other things, I look at how Kayankaya as a Turkish-born, German-raised person simultaneously possesses insider/outsider status and how Arjouni uses alcohol and drunkenness to construct Kayankaya’s German identity.
