Professor Birgit Dahlke has broad-ranging expertise in modern and contemporary German literature, with particular foci in gender and canonization, life writing, interdependencies of race, gender and age, German unification, and literary and cultural life of East(ern) Germany. Having taken a German Literature PhD from Freie Universität Berlin in 1994 she got her Higher Doctorate (Habilitation) from Humboldt University Berlin in 2003. Major publications include books on underground women’s poetry of the GDR (1997), youth and masculinity around 1900 (2006), and a biography about the East German poet Wolfgang Hilbig (2011). She taught not only in Berlin but in Urbana-Champaign, Illinois as well as in Nottingham, Great Britain; Newcastle, Great Britain; and Toulouse, France.