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: Looking for Work: (In)Visible Labor in Time of Migration and Globalization
Sonja E. Klocke is Director of the Center for German and European Studies and Professor of German Studies. Professor Klocke is currently working on a monograph entitled Dressing Up
Behind the Iron Curtain: Fashion and Politics in the GDR. Based on historical research on GDR consumer culture, fashion theory, media theory, and gender theory, and buttressed by archival materials, the book analyzes the presentation of East German women’s fashion and its production conditions in the nationally owned companies (VEBs) and in prisons in GDR and post-GDR films, photography, magazines, and literature.
Zach Ramon Fitzpatrick is Assistant Professor of German Studies, researching the intersection of the Asian Diaspora and German film history. He is working on a new book project about Vietnamese German cultural production of the 2020s. Building on his earlier research analyzing Asian representation in German fictional films, he considers multiple forms of media and production contexts in this project. Through music, literature, documentary film, television and streaming, and other cultural productions, he examines how young artists are expanding and self-determining what it means to be diasporic Vietnamese in 21st-century Germany, always keeping in mind how hidden labor and material conditions shape the works.
Mary Hennessy is Assistant Professor of German Studies. She is working on a book project — tentatively titled Vanishing Mediators — that interrogates the relationships among gender,
labor and media in Weimar Germany. The book explores the intersections of women’s labor and new communication and mass media technologies to challenge prevailing understandings of women as consumers and spectators of modern media. It further reveals women’s multiple (often hidden) labor in media production. She will soon begin work on a new project on women’s labor in the West German film industry.
THEME TWO: Confronting Otherness
Florence Vatan is Professor and Chair of the Department of French and Italian & Director of the Center for German and European Studies 2025-2026. She is investigating the collaboration between the ethnologist Richard Thurnwald and the Gestalt psychologist and musicologist Erich Moritz von Hornbostel during their research expedition to the Solomon Islands (1906-1909). Her work examines the challenges both researchers faced in their efforts to understand, document, and preserve vanishing oral and musical traditions within the context of a scientific mission aligned with Germany’s colonial agenda. She is also studying the reception of Lucien Lévy-Bruhl’s work in Germany during the 1920s and 1930s. The French philosopher and ethnologist Lucien Lévy-Bruhl developed a theory of “primitive mentality” and “participation” that had a significant impact on writers and thinkers such as Robert Musil, Gottfried Benn, Ernst Cassirer, Edmund Husserl,
and proponents of Gestalt psychology.
Hannah Eldridge is Professor of German, and currently working on a book project interrogating the mutual formation of theories of race and theories of literary genre, particularly the lyric, in the Germanophone world between roughly 1770 and 1830, as well as the implications of this interrelation up to the present day. Bringing together critical whiteness studies, postcolonial theory, and contemporary theories of the lyric, she considers authors from Immanuel Kant and Wilhelm von Humboldt to Toni Morrison and Édouard Glissant, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Karoline von
Günderrode to Philipp Khabo Koepsell and Marion Poschmann. The project analyzes the way discourses including philosophy, anthropology, ethnology, philology, and linguistics, as well as literature and literary studies, collaborate to shape the social construction known as “race.” In addition, she teaches courses on race and German culture regularly, most recently “Race, Whiteness, and Power in German Literature, 1800 to 2025.”
THEME THREE: Political Economy and Transatlantic Relations
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.
Michael Wagner is the William T. Evjue Distinguished Chair for the Wisconsin Idea and Professor of Journalism and Mass Communication. His focus on political communication, public opinion, and representation has shaped his four major lines of inquiry: (1) exploring the influence of mediated political messages on attitudes and behaviors, (2) examining how the interaction of psychological and contextual factors affect attitudes and behaviors, (3) how news logics influence political coverage, and (4) industry-academy collaborative research. He combines panel survey research, experimental methods, content analysis, in-depth interviews, focus groups, and collaborative interdisciplinary approaches to studying contemporary social problems relate to the health of democracy.
Mariel Barnes is Assistant Professor in the La Follette School of Public Policy who researches with the Gender, Violence & Policy Lab (based at UW-Madison), which investigates everyday violence against women to inform stronger policies and drive societal change. Her current book project, “State of Harm: How Public Policies Create Private Violence,” explores how European social and family policies influence rates of intimate partner violence. She is also authoring the manuscript “The Unintended Cost of Care: How Childcare Policies Impact Intimate Partner Violence in the EU,” which will soon be under review. In this work, Barnes presents evidence that certain policies, such as subsidized childcare, can have unintended negative consequences on intimate partner violence, while others may mitigate it.
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 new book project, Homelands: German
Expellees and the Global Campaign to End Forced Migration, examines how political organizations and research institutes representing postwar German “expellees” from Eastern Europe lobbied for the introduction of a “right to the homeland,” “right against expulsion,” and “right of return” in international law. Supported by DAAD funds, he has already conducted extensive research in
German and Austrian archives. He plans to expand his research to encompass the United Nations Archives in Geneva and the Council of Europe Archives in Strasbourg in order to study the participation of German expellees in international human rights commissions.
Liina-Ly Roos is Assistant Professor of Nordic in the German, Nordic, and Slavic+ Department. Liina-Ly has begun a new book project, Reimagining Health, Care, and Unwellness in Northern Europe, which analyzes films and TVseries from the Nordic and Baltic countries that engage with dominant narratives of health and “healthy” bodies that have contributed to the idea of Nordic
exceptionalism throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Most of the media analyzed in the book approach these questions through experiences of migration and diaspora. Supported by DAAD funds, she has done research and writing on the relevant theoretical frameworks in her current article-in-progress that reads the figure of the chronic in Finnish author Sofi Oksanen’s literary archive of migratory movements and traumatic memory across the Baltic Sea.
Leonie Schulte is Assistant Professor of Anthropology. Her book, The Trap of Integration: Language, Labor, and Migrant Belonging in Contemporary Germany, examines the everyday
impacts of language and integration policies on the socioeconomic trajectories of newcomers to Germany from Syria and Ukraine, emphasizing themes of marginalization, precarity and uncertainty. Supported by DAAD funds, she has conducted the crucial final phase of research and writing for her book manuscript proposal, which will be submitted to Princeton University Press in late 2025. She
has also begun foundational research on her new project, In the Shadow of the Gig Economy: Migrant Delivery Drivers and the Precarity of Germany’s Subcontract Work, which will be the focus of her research during the 2026-2027 academic year.