Max Kade Fellows 2012-2013
Brittany Amendolia
Brittany Amendolia is a graduate of Knox College, where she was one of the students who helped revive the German Club, serving as secretary and, after returning from an academic year abroad in Berlin, vice president. She shared photographs, collected print media, and her experiences with the club—helping a fellow student form her decision to study abroad in Germany for a year. During her senior year, Brittany devoted herself to the intense process of creating, proposing, and executing her own Honors Project. Her project “Beautiful Gender-Benders in a Scared-Straight Society” wove her interests in gender theory, performance, and Weimar Republic Berlin as well as modern-day Berlin—comparing the gender performance of the drag queens of today’s Berlin to the "New Woman" of the Weimar Republic. The success of her project made her the first student in more than a decade to graduate from Knox College with honors in German. Brittany looks forward to continuing her research in German Cultural Studies and Gender Studies. Indiana University’s wealth of resources has impassioned her to pursue a dual Ph.D. in German and Gender Studies.
David Bolter
David Bolter's interests in linguistics and Germanic linguistics lie primarily in the areas of historical linguistics, phonology, and dialectology. He also greatly enjoys the study of ancient languages and has studied Sanskrit, Latin and Old High German. As a junior in 2010-2011, he studied abroad for two semesters at the Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg, for which he received the Catherine Clarke Fraser Scholarship from the Germanic Studies Department at IU. That year, he carried out a dialect study in a small town in central Hesse. He hopes to continue working with dialects of German, ideally in the form of linguistic fieldwork, during his graduate studies at IU. In the 2011-2012 he was the recipient of the Abel Scholarship, which is a competitive scholarship for senior scholars at IU.
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Anselm Chen
Anselm Chen is a first-year student in the Ph.D. program in Comparative Literature who intends to study German and Chinese literature and intellectual history. He completed his undergraduate degree at Stanford University and also holds an M.A. from the University of Chicago, for which his thesis explored the interplay between the Enlightenment’s mind-body problematic and Kantian aesthetics in the theoretical works of Friedrich Schiller. In his doctoral studies, Anselm plans to read more deeply in the phenomenological tradition of Continental philosophy and examine the problems that lie at the intersection of aesthetic and narrative theory. He is currently investigating topics in two areas of research: firstly, the influence of German philosophy, literature, and art on issues of modernity in China, and, secondly, the function of poetry in the pre-modern Chinese novel. Eventually, he hopes to develop a project in comparative poetics that elucidates convergences and divergences between the epistemological, anthropological, and cultural systems of China and the West. With the opportunity to study under its acclaimed Germanists and comparatists, Anselm is excited to join the scholarly community in Bloomington as a Max Kade Fellow.
Elliott Evans
Growing up in a rural Appalachian town, Elliott Evans early on discovered both an appreciation of nature and a fascination for language. While pursuing his BA and MA at West Virginia University, he was able to fuse these interests in his studies focusing on the old languages and cultures of northern Europe. He was captivated by the fact that, though technologically unsophisticated, the peoples of the region possessed a profound cultural wisdom. In order to more fully appreciate the relatively few surviving linguistic artifacts, Elliott learned—often independently—to read several of the old European languages, such as Gothic and Old Norse. Ultimately he wrote his Master’s thesis on the old Germanic writing system, the runes, and showed why this branch of studies is so important for our modern society. Elliott is excited to pursue a PhD at Indiana University because of the outstanding Germanic Studies department and the rich network of neighboring departments.
Volker Schmitz
Volker Schmitz began studying towards his Magister degree in Political Science, History, and Psychology at the Ludwig-Maximilian-Universität Munich in 2002. After brief intermissions spent doing journalistic work in Munich and Berlin, he completed his studies in 2008 with a thesis on the treatment of political violence in the works of Albert Camus. Volker then relocated to Tel Aviv, where he first worked at the local Goethe Institute before moving on to the position of research assistant at the Institute for German History at Tel Aviv University. Upon his return to Berlin, he joined a Public Affairs agency. Between 2010 and 2012, Volker completed the M.A. program of North-American Studies at the John F. Kennedy Institute at Freie Universität Berlin. At the FU he mainly worked on the American labor movement and U.S. intellectual history during the twentieth century. At IU Bloomington, Volker is looking forward to support his Ph.D. program in Political Science with his studies in the Germanic Studies department, with the ultimate goal of arriving at a dissertation that can explore the American Left’s adaptation of twentieth-century continental thought and political philosophy.
Max Kade Fellows 2011-12:
John Paul Ewing
Max Kade Fellow 2011-2012
I am a Ph.D. Student in Medieval and Early Modern German Literature and have received degrees in Philosophy and English from Sam Houston State University (2007) and in Comparative Literature and German from Texas A&M University (2009). I have participated in study abroad programs with universities in Karlsruhe (2007) and Hamburg, Germany (2010-11). My research interests include, among other things, intellectual and religious history of the German middle ages and early modern period, questions tied to historiography and perceptions of history during this period, folk literature, and the early German Reformation. Recent essays under review deal with the Luther-Erasmus free will debates and moral problems concerning medieval economic discourse and usury in Sebastian Brant's "Das Narrenschiff." My past research projects have included connections between various works of German literature and theology (as well as natural science and economic discourse) and I am currently researching issues of historicity and fictionality in medieval and early modern German-language chronicles, in hopes of developing a dissertation topic in this area
Björn Fritsche
Max Kade Fellow 2011-2012
In 2009, I received my B.A. in Germanic Studies (Linguistics and Literature) and English Studies at the Heinrich-Heine-University, Düsseldorf. There, I also graduated with a Master’s degree in Germanic Studies (2011), where I concentrated on metaphor theory, semantics (with a focus on prototype and frame theory) and cognitive linguistics. I conducted extensive research on the neurobiological basis of information processing and developed a cognitive approach to literary studies, which I deployed inter alia on the analysis of the cultural criticism and stereotypes inherent in the literature of the Fin de siècle and of the early 20th century, such as the works of Thomas Mann, Arthur Schnitzler and Frank Wedekind. Furthermore, I applied research from cognitive science to political discourse analysis of the 20th and 21st centuries, as well as to the investigation of the cognitive role of enemy pictures and stereotypes in literature and media during German Nationalism. In addition, I undertook scholarly studies on the metaphorical-framing of the War against Terror, as well as international relations discourse analysis. At the beginning of 2011, I published my first article in this field, “Kognitive Feindbildrezeption - Applikation der konzeptuellen Metapherntheorie von George Lakoff auf die neuronale Feindbilderverarbeitung“. At the moment, I am conducting research on the subconscious effects of language on human decision-making processes (with a thematic priority on xenophobic propaganda techniques) as well as political and literary theory. Additionally, I examine metaphor theories, the role of myth in German Romanticism, and the literature of the Weimar Republic. Furthermore, I am working on my next publication in the field of a neurolinguistical political discourse analysis and the instrumentalization of the media for the dissemination of ideologies.
Julia Gehrig
Max Kade Fellow 2011-2012
My undergraduate studies in “Culture and Economics: German Language and Literature, Business Administration” at the University of Mannheim were the initial point for my scientific curiosity regarding modern German literature. During my five semesters at Mannheim as well as during my semester abroad at the University of Lausanne (Switzerland), I had the chance to develop a special interest in the literature of the twentieth century, contemporary literature, and cultural studies. After obtaining my Bachelors degree in 2010, I started graduate studies at the University of Hamburg, where I majored in German literatures with a special focus on theater and media. Thanks to the Max Kade Fellowship, I was able to transfer to Indiana University Bloomington in 2011. Currently, I have a special interest in diverse manifestations/representations of power structures, i.e., in post-colonial constellations and in the presentation of economics in literature.
Franziska Krüger
Max Kade Fellow 2011-2012
I am a Speech-Language Pathology major and conducted my undergraduate and graduate studies in Potsdam, Germany. I finished the program in 2010 and worked as a speech therapist for the past year. For my final paper during my graduate studies in Germany I looked at particular phonological aspects in the acquisition of vowels in German monolingual children and Turkish-German bilingual children. Additionally, for the past three years I have worked as a research assistant in a cross-linguistic research project in Berlin. The project aimed at developing psycholinguistic experiments to test and analyze first-language acquisition in normally developing children and children with specific language impairment. I have come to IU Bloomington to learn and conduct more research in my areas of interest. Currently these lie in learning more about the Germanic languages, how to teach the German language and culture to second-language learners as well as studying the processes involved in second-language acquisition, with the main focus on phonology and morphology. During my private time I like to learn new languages like Chinese and Japanese for cross-linguistic comparisons and for fun.
