Olivia Albiero

Olivia Albiero is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Germanics. She joined the department in 2009 after completing a degree in Modern Euro-American Languages, Literatures and Cultures at the University of Padua (Italy) and working as a language teaching assistant for Italian in Austria. Olivia spent the 2013-14 academic year at the Humboldt Universität in Berlin. During the past academic year, she represented the department as a Joff Hanauer Fellow for Excellence in Western Civilization and attended a bi-monthly interdisciplinary seminar led by Prof. John Toews. 

Her academic interests include German and Austrian literature from the late 19th to the 21st century, as well as narrative theory, crime fiction, and intermediality. Her dissertation, entitled “Moments of Rupture: Plotting, Character and Narration in Contemporary German Literature,” investigates storytelling and narrative practices in works of the 2000s. Olivia is also intrigued by the use of Digital Humanities tools both in pedagogy and research and is a member of the Graduate Interest Group “Teaching with Technology.” In June 2015, she attended her first "Digital Humanities Summer Institute" in Victoria, and took a class on "Text Mapping as Modelling."

She is excited to be working for the second year as the Lead TA in the Department of Germanics, where she will also be teaching during Winter and Spring quarter.