Graduate Research Symposium

The Department of Germanic Studies encourages and promotes scholarship for its graduate students. It holds an annual graduate research competition where students submit papers that are judged by the entire faculty. The authors of the best papers are invited to present at the Graduate Symposium. The awards are made possible by donations to the Robert Kauf Memorial endowment.

2016 Finalists Heading link

  • 1st Place: Zachary Fitzpatrick

    A Leap of Faith?: The Epistemological Crisis of Religion and Kinship in G.E. Lessing’s “Nathan der Weise”

  • 2nd Place: Lucas Riddle

    Was will Christian Kracht?

  • 3rd Place: Emily Gessman

    “The Unhappy Marriage,” the Bildungsbürgertum, and Alternative Partnerships

2015 Finalists Heading link

  • 1st Place: Christina Mekonen

    From Rivalry to Solidarity: The Black-Jewish Dialogue vis-á-vis the Holucaust

  • 2nd Place: Kerry Gawne

    Revolutionary Ideas on the Stage and in the Streets

  • 3rd Place: Christina Schultz

    How to Construct a Hero: Hitler as the Übermensch in Leni Riefenstahl’s “Triumph of the Will”

2014 Finalists Heading link

  • 1st Place (tied): Julia Koxholt

    Schein und Sein: Identität in Irene Disches Eine Jüdin für Charles Allen

  • 1st Place (tied): Christina Mekonen

    Der unzuverlässige Erzähler in Jurek Beckers Roman Jakob der Lügner (1969)

  • 2nd Place: Christina Schultz

    Empowered Females and Useless Males in Postwar German Cinema—A Look at the Changing Gender Roles in East and West Germany

2013 Finalists Heading link

  • 1st Place: Derek Schaefer

    Misconceptions of the Nazi-Past and the Shoah in the German Democratic Republic: Vergangenheitsbewältigung in Jurek Becker’s Bronsteins Kinder

  • 2nd Place: Katarzyna Kowalczyk

    Gender and Culture: Female Imagery in Die Juden von Barnow by K.E. Franzos

  • 3rd Place: Sharon Weiner

    Farocki’s Schnittstelle: A Strange Loop

2012 Finalists Heading link

  • 1st Place: Michelle Reyes

    Reconfigurations of the Devil: Animal Hauntings in Jeremias Gotthelf’s The Black Spider

  • 2nd Place: Jai Kshirsagar

    Anti-Semitism, the Common Ground between Zionism and Anti-Zionism: A Juxtaposition of Herzl’s Zionist Play Das Neue Ghetto and Pappenheim’s Anti-Zionist Play Tragische Momente: Drei Lebensbilder

  • 3rd Place: Jon Tillotson

    Conceptions of Class and Knowledge in Christoph Wilhelm Hufeland’s Die Kunst, das menschliche Leben zu verlängern (1796)

2011 Finalists Heading link

  • 1st Place: Kristina Förster

    For an “In Between”: On the Road in Die Welt ist groß und Rettung lauert überall

  • 2nd Place: Jai Kshirsagar

    Self-perception vs. Treatment by Society: Invisible Woman: Growing up Black in Germany and Afro-deutsch I and II

  • 3rd Place: Jon Tillotson

    Deconstructing Myth in Vladimir Vertlib’s Am Morgen des zwölften Tages