Graduate Student News: Spring 2025
Lorna McCarron’s article “Therapists, Vending Machines, and Winding Roads: Race and Mental Health in Olivia Wenzel’s 1000 Serpentinen Angst” appeared in The German Quarterly (vol. 98, no. 1). This essay explores the damaging effects of racism on the mental health of the Black German protagonist of Wenzel’s autofictional novel. She first wrote this paper as a final for Prof. Friederike Eigler’s class “Autobiographical Fiction” in Spring 2021 and was able to revise it as a 2022–23 Georgetown University Medical Humanities Research Fellow.
Lorna was selected to receive a DAAD scholarship and will spend the Winter Semester 2025–26 at Humboldt University (HU) in Berlin, where she will work under the supervision of Prof. Ulrike Vedder. While there, she will write the final chapter of her dissertation, exploring the depiction of corporeality in Kim de l’Horizon’s Blutbuch (2022). In addition, she looks forward to engaging with the city’s various literary institutions and participating in research colloquia at the HU Institute of German Literature and Center for Transdisciplinary Gender Studies.
PhD student Katie Miller-Purrenhage’s submitted panel “Black (Im)Mobility: Media, Mobility, and the Politics of Intersectional Belonging” was accepted to the GSA Conference of Fall 2025. Co-sponsored by the Coalition for Women in German (WiG) and the Black Diaspora Studies Network (BDSN), this panel explores a focused investigative scope on the interwoven features of marginalization, erasure, im/mobility, and in/accessibility to resources and spaces experienced by individuals who identify with and are categorized in accordance to Black experience, identity, and correlating politics. Katie was also chosen to collaborate on a chapter for an edited volume on the history of the American Association of Teachers of German (AATG) to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the organization.
Graduate student Ross Parks has spent part of this last year working on a forthcoming publication in collaboration with researchers at the Johns Hopkins’ Bloomberg School of Public Health. Funded by the Geneva-based Oak Foundation, the project investigates the generation of national political priority for addressing sexual violence against children across the globe. Ross was hired onto the project as a member of the case study considering Germany’s prioritization of the issue. His role has included conducting and translating interviews with German academics, government officials, advocates, and medical professionals to help identify and interpret the social, political, and institutional factors that shape national priority for and implementation of child protection policies. He will be listed as a co-author on the study which is expected to be published within the year.
Germany is one of six countries considered within the project headed by Jeremy Shiffman, PhD, MA, Bloomberg Distinguished Professor in the Department of International Health at the Bloomberg School and at the School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), and Yusra Shawar, PhD, MPH, Associate Research Professor in the Department of International Health. Georgetown’s Adam Koon in the Department of Global Health also shares co-authorship on the German case study. Other countries included in the project are Chile, Bolivia, South Africa, UAE and the United Kingdom. Please follow this link to read more about the nature of the study: Addressing Sexual Violence Against Children | Johns Hopkins | Bloomberg School of Public Health.
Congratulations also to Katie Lightfoot, Sally Simpson, Kristina Schauhoff, Ross Parks, Emilia Endler, and Katie Miller-Purrenhage, who have all passed their oral comprehensive exams this spring!