New Course: Crisis & Rebellion in Germany and Beyond (TRAD Tier Two)

March 20, 2012
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What do people do in a crisis? Do they tend to react with fear, imagination, xenophobia, greed, ambition, anger, solidarity, love? This lecture course explores several moments of crisis and rebellion in German and European history since the 18th century. We will ask how those moments began, what changes they brought about, and how (or whether) they ended. Together, we will survey the art, music, politics, philosophy, film, television, public culture, literature, and language(s) that got made and remade in these moments of grave or joyous uncertainty—in order to more deeply understand the human condition under extreme and unexpected circumstances.  

This new TRAD course offered by the Department of German Studies will be introduced in Fall 2012 and offered by Prof. David Gramling on T/Th 2:00-3:15 pm. The course number is GER 276.

David Gramling received his PhD in German Literature and Culture from the University of California Berkeley in August 2008, before moving to Ankara, Turkey, for his first professorship. His dissertation, “Where Here Begins: Monolingualism and the Spatial Imagination,” proposed new theoretical approaches to literary monolingualism, as it developed from the Enlightenment period to twenty-first century migration fiction and film. With essays on Franz Kafka, Primo Levi, Fatih Akın, Emine Sevgi Özdamar, and Orhan Pamuk, his recent publications highlight the productive conflict of interest between monolingual textuality and multilingual world. David grew up in Central Massachusetts and Cape Cod. He attended Wachusett Regional High School in Holden, Massachusetts; Middlebury College in Middlebury, VT; the Johannes Gutenberg Universität-Mainz in Mainz, Germany; the University of California at Berkeley; the University of Washington in Seattle; the Humboldt Universität zu Berlin; and the Boğaziçi University in İstanbul, Turkey. Before joining the German Studies faculty at the University of Arizona, he taught in the humanities program at Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey, from 2008 to 2010. In his free time, David enjoys bicycling and baking bread.