Director, Center for German and European Studies
Professor Sonja E. Klocke
Originally from Germany, Sonja Klocke received her Ph.D. at Indiana University – Bloomington in 2007. After teaching at Knox College (IL) for five years, she joined the UW-Madison Department of German in 2012 and is affiliated with the Gender and Women’s Studies Department. Her research and teaching focus on German culture from the late eighteenth to the twenty-first centuries. Dr. Klocke focuses on postwar and contemporary literature and film from the twentieth- to the twenty-first-century, including the legacy of the GDR and the Holocaust, women’s writing, minority literature, and transnational literature.
Her monograph, Inscription and Rebellion: Illness and the Symptomatic Body in East German Literature (Camden House, 2015), appeared in paperback in 2019. She also co-edited Christa Wolf: A Companion (with Jennifer Hosek, de Gruyter, 2018) and Protest and Refusal: New Trends in German Literature since 1989 (with Hans Adler, 2018). In 2019, she co-edited a special issue for Colloquia Germanica, New Perspectives on Young Adult GDR Literature and Film (with Ada Bieber). Currently, Sonja is working on a co-edited handbook on GDR culture and a new project exploring the portrayal of contemporary female terrorists as witches and as victims of modern witch-hunts. Dr. Klocke is also proud to serve as co-editor of the quarterly Monatshefte (with Hannah Eldridge, since 2019).
CGES Research Faculty
THEME ONE: Benefits of Diversity: Results of Cultures in Motion
Sonja E. Klocke is Director of the Center for German and European Studies
Venkat Mani is Professor of German, and his research interests include nineteenth to twenty-first-century German literature and culture, world literature in translation, migration in the German and European context, book- and digital cultural histories, theories of cosmopolitanism, globalization, post-colonialism, and transnationalism. He received grants and awards for the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation’s Fellowship for Senior Researchers [2011-12; 2013; Host institution: Institute of Book Studies, University of Leipzig], Andrew Mellon Foundation’s, Mellon Sawyer Seminar in Comparative Cultural Studies Grant for the project, “Bibliomigrancy: World Literature in the Public Sphere” (2014-16), and UW-Madison’s Kellett Research Award (2017-20).
Zach Ramon Fitzpatrick is Assistant Professor of German Studies, researching the intersection of the Asian Diaspora and German film history. He is currently co-editing a volume tentatively titled New Narratives of Asian German Film History: Imagination, Collaboration, and Diasporic Representation.
Nâlân Erbil is a first-generation college graduate and the first in her extended family to have a PhD. As an interdisciplinary literary teacher-scholar by training, she teaches Turkish language, literature and film courses at UW-Madison. Her pedagogical interest lies particularly in social justice education in teaching Turkish cultures in the US. Nâlân is currently working on a project that investigates how and why understanding of literariness has changed in Turkish literary history, and how this transformation has influenced contemporary writing and thought. Her second project will question the concept of Turkish-Germanness in the works of writers living in Turkey and writing in Turkish. She currently serves as the Pedagogy Director of the Arabic, Persian, and Turkish Language Institute and the Turkish Flagship Language Initiative.
THEME TWO: Diverse Musical Networks: Berlin and Madison in the 1960s
Pamela Potter is Professor of Musicology who also holds affiliations with the School of Music and the Center for Jewish Studies. Her interests concentrate on relating music, the arts, and the writing of cultural history to ideological, political, social, and economic conditions, focusing on twentieth-century Germany, Jewish music, and the impact of German emigration on American musical life.
Parry Karp is Artist-in-Residence at the Mead Witter School of Music and the Robert and Linda Graebner Professor of Chamber Music and Cello. He has been cellist of the Pro Arte Quartet for the past 45 years, playing for venues all around the globe. Karp performs new music, premiering concerti, sonatas, and chamber music, many of which were written for him. In the spring of 2016, he was named a fellow of the Wisconsin Academy.
Jonathon Pollack is Professor of History at Madison Area Technical College and Honorary Fellow at the Mosse Weinstein Center for Jewish Studies. He has published articles in American Jewish History, Journal of Jewish Identities, and various conference volumes. He is currently finishing his book, Wisconsin, The New Home of the Jew: 150 Years of Jewish Life at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
THEME THREE: Economic and Political Shocks in Europe Since 2008
Mark Copelovitch is Professor in the Department of Political Science and the Robert M. La Follette School of Public Affairs at the University of Wisconsin—Madison. Professor Copelovitch studies international political economy and international organizations, with a focus on the politics of international trade, international finance, the International Monetary Fund, and European integration. He is the author of The International Monetary Fund in the Global Economy: Banks, Bonds, and Bailouts (Cambridge University Press, 2010), Comparative Political Studies, the Journal of Politics, International Organization, International Studies Quarterly, and Review of International Organizations.
Mariel Barnes is Assistant Professor of Public Affairs. Barnes’ primary research agenda examines everyday forms of violence against women, gender, and the politics of the welfare state with a specific focus on highly industrialized countries. She also is interested in the relationship between gender and institutions, including the representation and incorporation of women. In all her research, Professor Barnes utilizes a mixed-methodology approach, combining large quantitative analysis with qualitative historical comparative analysis, archival sources, interviews, and ethnographic observation. Her research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the Berlin Program for Advanced German and European Studies at the Freie Universität Berlin, the Mercatus Center, and the Institute for Humane Studies.
Adeline Lo is Assistant Professor of Political Science and Glenn B. & Cleone Orr Hawkins Chair. Her research interests lie in the design of statistical tools for prediction and measurement for applied social sciences. She has an ongoing research agenda on high dimensional forecasting, especially in application to conflict. A second research agenda explores measurement of challenging quantities of interest in and factors that traditionally motivate intra-state conflict. Her research has led her to work with and construct tools for observational, text, experimental and network data. Adeline’s works have been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Comparative Political Studies, and Nature.
Nils Ringe is Professor, Robert F. and Sylvia T. Wagner Chair, and Associate Chair for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in the Department of Political Science. His research and teaching interests center on democratic political institutions, European Union politics, populism, elections, legislative politics, political parties, policy making, and political networks. In past years, Ringe held a Jean Monnet Chair (2015-2021) and served as the Director of the Center for European Studies (2014-2021), the Jean Monnet European Union Center of Excellence (2015-2018), and the Jean Monnet EU Center of Excellence for Comparative Populism (2019-2022). His publications include The Language(s) of Politics: Multilingual Policy-Making in the European Union, Populists and the Pandemic: How Populists Around the World Respond to COVID-19, The European Union and Beyond: Multi-Level Governance, Institutions, and Policy-Making, and Bridging the Information Gap: Legislative Member Organizations as Social Networks in the United States and the European Union.
THEME FOUR: Migration and Memory in Postwar and Contemporary Europe
Brandon Bloch is Assistant Professor of History who is a Historian of modern Europe, with an emphasis on Germany and its global entanglements. His research and teaching foreground questions of democracy, citizenship, and human rights. He is especially interested in how European national and religious identities have evolved against the backdrop of territorial conflict, divided sovereignties, ethnic cleansing, and genocide.
Liina-Ly Roos is Assistant Professor of Nordic in the German, Nordic, and Slavic+ Department. Liina-Ly specializes in twentieth- and twenty-first-century Nordic and Baltic culture with concentrations on post-WWII and contemporary film, television, and literature. Her writings have been published in Baltic Screen Media Review (2014), and Nordic War Stories. Roos’ current book project, The Not-Quite Child, Invisible Structures of Memory and Migration, analyzes the popular figure of the child in contemporary Nordic films and literature that illuminates unique ways of movement across proximate borders and the emotional histories of nations. She is also working on an article on parody music videos and performance of memory on Estonian Public Broadcasting. Roos is currently serving on the Executive Council for the Society for the Advancement of Scandinavian Study. Her ongoing work is concerned with the relationship between language proficiency requirements and newcomer access to the German labor market, exploring how underlying societal expectations for linguistic integration, as well as bureaucratic and administrative procedures, intersect with newcomers’ own decision-making and future-building.
Leonie Schulte is Assistant Professor of Anthropology. She examines the ways in which state-sanctioned “integration” requirements impact newcomers’ socioeconomic (im)mobility. In so doing, her work addresses the lingua-temporal dimensions of migration, displacement, and policy-in-practice, exploring themes of temporal disruption, uncertainty, waiting, stuckness, and boredom.