CGES Faculty 2024-2025

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, and taught at Knox College (IL) for five years before joining the Department of German in 2012. She is affiliated with the UW-Madison Gender and Women Studies Department. Her research and teaching interests range from the late eighteenth to the twenty-first centuries, and she specializes in twentieth to twenty-first century German culture with a specific focus on postwar and contemporary German literature and film. This includes 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. A co-edited volume, Christa Wolf: A Companion (with Jennifer Hosek) was published with de Gruyter in 2018, a co-edited volume entitled Protest and Refusal: New Trends in German Literature since 1989 (with Hans Adler) appeared in the fall of the same year, and a co-edited special issue for Colloquia Germanica, New Perspectives on Young Adult GDR Literature and Film (with Ada Bieber) was published in 2019. Currently, Sonja works on a co-edited handbook on GDR culture, and on her new project that revolves around the portrayal of contemporary female terrorists as witches and as victims of modern witch-hunts. She 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 the director of the Center for German and European Studies.

Venkat Mani is a Professor of German and his research interests include 19th to 21st Century German literature and culture, world literature in translation, migration in the German and European context, book- and digital cultural histories, and theories of cosmopolitanism, globalization, post-colonialism, and transnationalism. He received grants and awards for the Alexander for Humboldt Foundation’s Fellowship for Senior Researchers [2011-12; 2013; Host institution: Institute of Book Studies, University of Leipzig], and 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). He is also serving as Director, Center for South Asia, UW-Madison.

Zach Ramon Fitzpatrick is an 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 the 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 a 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 an 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 a 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: Migration and Memory in Postwar and Contemporary Europe 

Brandon Bloch is an 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 an 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 an Assistant Professor of Anthropology. She examines the ways in which state-sanctioned “integration” requirements impact newcomers’ socioeconomic (im)mobility. In so doing, my work addresses the lingua-temporal dimensions of migration, displacement, and policy-in-practice, exploring themes of temporal disruption, uncertainty, waiting, stuckness, and boredom.