Katherine (Katie) Lightfoot is a PhD candidate in Georgetown University’s Department of German. Her research interests include migration studies and postmigrant literature published in the German-speaking world, as well as second-language acquisition and reflective teaching and learning practices. Her dissertation examines how contemporary Turkish-German postmigrant literature and theater negotiates intergenerational belonging through representations of silence and memory. The project asks how contemporary Turkish-German postmigrant literature reimagines and reframes the inherited “migration narrative” through such representations of silence, memory, and spatial negotiation, particularly in texts written from second- and third-generation perspectives.
Katie graduated with a BA in International Studies and German from the University of Alabama (UA). As an undergraduate student, she spent one year in Hamburg, Germany, on an academic exchange through the Federation of German-American Clubs. She then decided to pursue her MA and completed a Master’s in German Literature at UA. During the 2021-2022 academic year, Katie lived in Cuxhaven, Germany, and taught English and German on a Fulbright grant. In June of 2023, Katie traveled to Berlin to participate in the “German Literary Institutions: The Berlin Seminar” before beginning her first semester at Georgetown as a PhD student (August 2023). She is a member of the National German Honor Society, Delta Phi Alpha, as well as of the German Studies Association (GSA), the American Association of Teachers of German (AATG), and the Coalition for Women in German. During her time as a graduate student, Katie has taught courses ranging from first- to sixth-semester German language and culture courses, and has assisted in teaching Georgetown German’s cultural humanities and arts course “Witches in History, Literature, and Film.” Furthermore, she served as the Graduate Student Editorial Assistant for the academic journal Gegenwartsliteratur: Ein germanistisches Jahrbuch (2025-2026) and currently serves as the Graduate Assistant to the German Studies Review.