German Studies

Kierstin H. Brehm

Brehm

Curriculum Vitae

• M.A. German Studies, University of California, Irvine
• B.S. Business Administration, Computer Information Systems (CIS), California State Polytechnic University, Pomona
• B.A. International Relations / German Studies, University of California, Davis

Scholarly interests include popular music of 1950's and '60s Germany, cosmopolitanism and transnationalism, and second-language teaching

Matthew Cooper

Cooper

I received my BA in Comparative Literature from UC Riverside in 2013. My work is grounded in German Romanticism and Idealism, namely aesthetics after Kant and theories of the symbol, problems of representation, morphology and Naturphilosophie.

Hanbing Huang

B.A., English and International Studies, China Foreign Affairs University, 2023

Research Interests: Literary theory, deconstruction, psychoanalysis

Steven Nave

Nave

Steven Nave received his B.A. in German Studies from Colgate University in 2017 and his M.A. from UCI in 2019. His scholarly interests are in German perceptions of Asia, especially Orientalisms in philosophy and literature. He is also invested in undergraduate engagement, organizing and facilitating the UCI Kaffeestunde and Filmabend. He served as Graduate Representative during the 2018-2019 academic year.

Yao Pei

Pei

B.A. in German, Beihang University, China, 2016.

Scholarly interests includes 20th Century German Austrian modernism, German-Chinese philosophical exchange, second-language teaching

Jacob Schaubs

Schaubs

-B.A. German/Spanish, University of Wisconsin Oshkosh

Having closely examined the efficacy of Titus Hoffmann's German translation of the 2012 Broadway musical Next to Normal, I find myself interested in storytelling in translation and the possible permutations in understanding and meaning wrought by the inability of any one language to map itself onto another perfectly. I am particularly drawn to examining how the theatre works to shape the world and how various languages and cultures understand it.

Xuxu Song

Xuxu Song

Xuxu Song is a Mellon Humanities Faculty Fellow for 2022-2023 and teaches German in the Department of European Languages and Studies. She received her Ph.D. in German in June 2022. A research stay in Mannheim and Frankfurt on a DAAD doctoral research fellowship and fellowships from the Humanities Center at UC Irvine have supported her work. She will be teaching as Lecturer in the German Department at Princeton University in Spring 2023. Xuxu previously studied German at Georg-August-Universität Göttingen and Renmin University of China. She also holds a Master’s in Public Administration from the University of Southern California. She has interpreted for intergovernmental meetings, and her translation has appeared on TELOSscope.

Xuxu’s research and teaching interests center on eighteenth- to twentieth-century German literature and its imbrication with intellectual history; contemporary migration studies in a global context; representations of war; translation studies; and women’s studies. Her dissertation, “A Study of the Athenaeum (1798-1800) as the Early German Romantic Work of Art,” demonstrates that the multi-year, multi-volume, and multi-authored journal is in its own right a paradigmatic artwork of the Jena constellation. She takes a holistic approach to trace this polyphonic, interdisciplinary, and transcultural work of Sympoesie/Symphilosophie by breaking the internal barriers between canonical and lesser-known contributions to the journal and bringing them into dialogue.

Her work is largely motivated by the interest in bringing together “major” and “minor” voices in various kinds of German context. She is currently working on three essays that go into greater detail on lesser-known yet crucial aspects of romantic aesthetic theory and practice. Each explores a different theoretical perspective: women authors around 1800 (“gynocriticism”), romantic nature and ecocriticism, and translation studies. They are united by the question of how noncanonical and marginalized voices in romanticism in Jena and Berlin dynamized the scene of intellectual exchange and co-shaped its central aesthetics in ways that are relevant for crucial discussions of global concern of our day.

Outside of Academia, she is an eventing rider of the United States Eventing Association. With a background in public administration and passion about international affairs, she continues to explore issues around geopolitical and economic developments across the globe.
   

Jonas Weaver

I am a Ph.D candidate in German Studies in the Department of European Languages and Studies at UC Irvine. I previously obtained my B.A. in philosophy and German at Calvin University in 2018. My dissertation topic focuses on the postwar work of Wolfgang Koeppen. Specifically, I focus on the way in which the novels occupy the interregnum between the postwar period and the early Federal Republic. I emphasize the way Koeppen's use of modernist literary form facilitates the exploration and staging of both emerging conflicts and continuities with the recent National Socialist past. 

I have further interests in applied linguistics and questions of diversity and language learning. I am interested in German language film and music, particularly of the late 20th and early 21st century. And I am also fascinated by Austrian literature and culture. 

 

 

Lucas Wright

Wright

Curriculum Vitae

 

I am a PhD student in the German Program in the Department of European Languages and Studies at the University of California, Irvine. I hold an M.A. in Religious Studies from UC Santa Barbara, an M.A. in Theology, Philosophy, and Literature from the University of Nottingham in the United Kingdom, and a B.A. with a concentration in Theology and Philosophy. My current research focuses in the areas of Modern Jewish Thought, Romanticism, and German Idealism in connection with continental philosophy and mysticism.