This was an exciting year for me in the Germanics Department. I finished my MA with a paper examining Maja Haderlap’s use of Slovenian-German code-switching within her novel Engel des Vergessens. I also started teaching German 101 and 102 this year. Teaching has been a lot of work, but it was so fulfilling to see my students learn and become more confident with their German abilities. I helped with our department’s Kaffeestunde events, where we offered students an extra opportunity to practice their German and reinforce what they learned in class in a more relaxed environment. Additionally, I helped to prepare for this year’s Interdisciplinary Graduate Student Conference. All the different topics that students in and outside of Germanics are working on were very interesting.
I am eager to start my next research project, which will look at Kafka as an editor. He had written several times about Yiddish and how it could not be translated into German without losing some cultural understanding in the process. He edited an article written in German by a Yiddish-speaking friend. I want to explore whether any Yiddish-inflected phrases, which Kafka enjoyed artistically, remain in the edited piece or if Kafka decided to remove them. I am very excited to be going to Münster, Germany this following school year to teach at the university’s Sprachenzentrum, before I come back and start preparing for my PhD exams.