Mel started their graduate studies at Georgetown in Fall 2017, obtaining their MA in Summer 2021. They are working towards both a Ph.D. in German Studies and a Ph.D. Certificate in Disability Studies. They received their BA in German and Russian from the University of Iowa in December 2014. As an undergraduate, they participated in the Academic Year in Freiburg program, taking courses in Baden-Württemberg at Albert-Ludwigs-Universität and the Pädagogische Hochschule Freiburg. They later worked as a freelance translator and tutor and spent two years as an English Teaching Assistant at the Gymnasium-level with the Austrian-American Educational Commission (now Fulbright Austria), first in Feldkirch, Vorarlberg, and then in Vienna. They are very fond of teaching and expanding their knowledge of language pedagogy and genre theory.
Mel’s current research interests include 20th century German and Austrian Literature, focusing on representations of identity, primarily disability, gender, and cultural hybridity. Their dissertation is titled Literary Case Studies in the Social Power Dynamics of Non-normative Embodiment: Synthesizing Disability Sentiments across German & Austrian Fiction & Poetry 1900-1933. This dissertation explores the social power dynamics that manifold disability depictions across genre, content, disability ‘type’, and authorial backgrounds reveal. The project aims to better locate/understand the cultural attitudes towards disabled people before the Nazi genocide of an estimated 300,000 adults with disabilities. The dissertation is structured thematically into five chapters with their own theoretical framework: 1) Methodological Contextualization 2) Eugenics Discourse as Reference Point for Early 20th Century Disability Notions 3) Disabled Authors & Cripistemological Perspectives 4) War Disablement, and 5) Feminist Disability Studies. All chapters address three primary research questions: A) What symbolic meanings are given to disabled bodies? B) How is the social strain on disabled characters depicted across literary works? And C) Do literary depictions tangibly hierarchize disability?