Graduate Student News

Congratulations to Ekaterina Soloveva (PhD ’24) on the successful defense of her dissertation Post-Soviet Migrant Identity in Germany Through the Eyes of Generation 1.5: Multimodal SFL-based Study of Instagram Discourse. Katya currently holds an appointment as Lecturer in German at Princeton University in Princeton, NJ.

We also congratulate PhD students Emma Eisenbeis and Dingning Chen on successfully passing their written comprehensive exams this semeter!

Several PhD students presented during the 2024 German Studies Association conference, held in Atlanta, GA, from September 26-29, including Maria Speggiorin, Sally Simpson, and Katie Miller-Purrenhage. Additional information about their presentations can be found in this announcement.

PhD student Ross Parks took part in the week-long 2024 DAAD Doctoral Conference for German and European Studies at Cambridge, United Kingdom, in November. His reading group entitled, “Colonial Europe: Germany’s Lessons for a Postcolonial Continent” asked participants to discuss in what ways Europe’s (in)ability to reconcile with its colonial past remains influenced by pro-Europeanists’ messaging that post-45 Europe represents a clean break with its dark past. To what extent the European Union therefore relies on Germany’s memory culture surrounding the Second World War as the “entry-ticket” into the European Union, while simultaneously distancing itself from its colonial past, was central to the discussion. Participants were therefore asked to consider in what ways both Germany and the European Union might better confront the enduring legacy of European imperialism in its post-colonial relations both within and outside Europe.