Frank Baron, Ph.D.
Alumnus of the University of California at Berkeley
Professor Frank Baron began teaching at the University of Kansas in 1970, after two years of teaching with the Peace Corps in Ethiopia and an additional two years conducting research in Munich on German Renaissance and Reformation literary history.
His
primary teaching and research interests are in fifteenth-
and sixteenth- century as well as twentieth-century studies.
Baron has published books and articles on various aspects
of the European Faust tradition and on the works of Rainer
Maria Rilke, Thomas Mann, Hermann Hesse, and the artist/author
Albert Bloch. He has received grants from the Alexander von
Humboldt Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities,
the National Science Foundation, the Fulbright Foundation,
the German Academic Exchange (DAAD), and the University of
Kansas Hall Center.
Experiences
as a child in Hungary during World War II prompted interest
in the topic of the Holocaust and resulted (in collaboration
with Hungarian journalist Sandor Szenes) in a book about Hungary
and Auschwitz.
He is director of the Max Kade Center for German-American
Studies.
Contact:
fbaron@ku.edu
Curriculum Vitae
James Brown, Ph.D.
Alumnus of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
James Brown comes to the department after earning his doctorate from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His dissertation explores the multiple functions of the rhetorical device ekphrasis - the verbal representation of a visual representation - and the construction of courtly identity in the thirteenth-century romance Wigalois by Wirnt von Gravenberg. His research interests include Arthurian romance, intersections of literature and visual art, medievalism, orality and literacy, and the history of the book.
Contact: jhb@ku.edu
Heide Crawford, Ph.D.
Alumna of Pennsylvania State University
Heide Crawford joined the department in 2003. Her primary
teaching and research interests are the Enlightenment and
the Age of Goethe, which span the 18th and early 19th centuries.
Her specific areas of interest include the representation
of cultural history and folklore in poetry and other literary
genres. Directly related to these areas of interest are her
current research projects on the origins of the literary vampire
in German ballad poetry, as well as the representation of
magic, the occult and the Faust legend in literature. In addition
to her research she participates regularly in national and
international conferences.
Contact: hac@ku.edu
William D. Keel, Ph.D.
Alumnus of Indiana University
Professor and Chair
William D. Keel's primary teaching and research interests are in German dialectology, Germanic philology, the structure of Modern German, and German-American studies. He is internationally recognized as an expert on German settlement dialects (Sprachinseln) in the American Midwest and has lectured on that subject at several German universities and the Institut für deutsche Sprache in Mannheim.
He is the recipient of German-American collaborative research grants from the American Council of Learned Societies and the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD). Since 1981, he has served as editor of the Yearbook of German-American Studies and, since 1986, as a member of the executive committee of the Society for German-American Studies.>
Publications include co-edited books German Emigration from Bukovina to the Americas (1996) with Kurt Rein (University of Munich) and German Language Varieties Worldwide: Internal and External Perspectives (2003) with Klaus Mattheier (University of Heidelberg) as well as and a number of articles treating Hannoverian Low German, German-Bohemian and Mennonite Low German dialects in Kansas and Missouri as well as the settlement history of Pennsylvania Germans in Kansas. His edited work on The Volga Germans of West Central Kansas was published in 2004.
He has been active in the Kansas Association of Teachers of German for a number of years, serving on the executive committee from 1994-97 and again from 2004-07. Since 1989, he has lectured in numerous communities in the region as a member of the Speakers' Bureau of the Kansas Humanities Council. Keel is the recipient of the Verdienstkreuz am Bande of the Federal Republic of Germany (1999) for his contributions to German-American educational and cultural exchanges. The KU College of Liberal Arts and Sciences honored him with the Steeples Award for Outstanding Service to Kansans in 2006. Since 1990 he has chaired the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures.
Contact:
wkeel@ku.edu
Curriculum Vitae
Leonie A. Marx, Ph.D.
Alumna of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Professor Marx received her Ph.D. in German, Scandinavian, and Comparative literature. For two years, she taught Danish language, literature, and culture at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, before joining the University of Kansas. Her teaching concentrates on modern German literature, primarily of the twentieth century; it includes the study of prose fiction, women authors and interdisciplinary approaches to literature. She has also taught at universities in Germany and Denmark and received a grant from the Danish Center for Advanced Studies in the Humanities.
In her research, she combines her interests in German and Danish literature, German-Scandinavian literary relations, and exile studies. She has published articles on Danish and German authors. Among her book publications are a pioneering analysis of the contemporary Danish author Benny Andersen (English edition, 1983; Danish edition 1986), a comprehensive study of the German short story since the late nineteenth century (Metzler, 3rd augmented edition, 2005), a volume focusing on the literatures of Germany and Scandinavia, co-edited with Herbert Knust (1989). In addition, she has published book chapters, such as: "Der deutsche Frauenroman im 19. Jahrhundert" (Handbuch des Romans), "Thomas Mann und die Literaturen Skandinaviens" (Thomas-Mann-Handbuch), and "Die deutsche Kurzgeschichte" (Formen der Literatur).
Contact: marx@ku.edu
Nina Vyatkina, Ph.D.
Alumna of Pennsylvania State University
Nina Vyatkina joined the department in 2007. She earned her Ph.D. in German with specialization in Applied Linguistics from the Pennsylvania State University. Her research interests include Second Language Acquisition, Interlanguage Pragmatics, and Learner Corpus Analysis. She has published on second language development of learners of German who participate in intercultural computer-mediated communication. She coordinates the German language proficiency sequence.
Contact: vyatkina@ku.edu
Lorie A. Vanchena, Ph.D.
Alumna of Washington University in St. Louis
Lorie A. Vanchena joined the department in 2008 as Associate Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures. Her monograph, Political Poetry in Periodicals and the Shaping of German National Consciousness in the Nineteenth Century (2000), demonstrates that between 1840 and 1871 German periodicals regularly featured poems as part of the public debate over contemporary political developments. In 2006 she published Anton in America: A Novel from German-American Life, the first English translation and scholarly edition of a work written in 1862 by the witty intellectual revolutionary, historian, and journalist Reinhold Solger. She has also published articles on nineteenth-century German and German-American literature. She is currently working on a book-length study of Solger as an agent of German-American cultural transfer in the 1850s and 1860s. Her research interests include the reception and transformation in nineteenth-century America of German cultural materials, immigrant identity formation, German nationalism and national identity, and nineteenth-century political drama and poetry. Her teaching interests include nineteenth-century German and German-American literature and culture.
Professor Vanchena has received grants from the American Philosophical Society, the German Academic Exchange Service, and the Checkpoint Charlie Foundation (Berlin). In addition to participating regularly in national and international conferences, she currently serves as Editor of the H-Net list for German-American and German-Canadian Studies (H-GAGCS). She was also recently appointed Book Review Editor for the Yearbook of German-American Studies.
Contact: vanchena@ku.edu
Professor Emeritus Ernst S. Dick, Dr. Phil.
Alumnus of the University of Münster
Professor Ernst Dick teaches Germanic philology, medieval literature, and modern German. Before joining the German department at Kansas in 1968, he taught at the University of Virginia. For shorter periods he was also affiliated with Johns Hopkins University, the University of Montana, and the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
His primary research interests are Germanic word studies and medieval German literature, especially in epic and romance. In the modern period, he pursues reception studies of medieval epic, but is also interested in the Novelle and in modern drama (Dürrenmatt).
His major publications include an etymological and semantic study on central terms of Germanic religion and culture (Ae. DRYHT und seine Sippe), several co-edited books, and numerous articles on medieval German literature, Germanic philology, reception studies, and folklore. Reflecting his secondary interest in modern literature, he has also published articles on Annette von Droste-Hüllshoff and Friedrich Dürrenmatt.
Contact: esdick@ku.edu
Professor Emeritus Helmut E. Huelsbergen Dr. Phil.
Alumnus of the University of Köln
Contact: huelsber@ku.edu
Professor Emeritus Warren Maurer, Ph.D.
Alumnus of the University of California-Berkeley
Contact: german@ku.edu,/p>
Associate Professor Emeritus Henry F. Fullenwider, Ph.D. Alumnus of the University of California-Davis
Contact: hfullenw@cc.helsinki.fi
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