http://www.colby.edu/personal/a/akoch/Teaching.html

In my current investigation of literary and visual representations of cats in German culture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, I consider a number of questions on alterity and sameness as well as the relationship between humans and animals. For this study, I am applying an ecocritical approach to cats as an animal other that subverts longstanding humanist traditions of constructing the human. I am particularly interested in how this process appears to be tied in general to the exposure to a threatening and revolutionizing (Um)Welt. Most recently, I have begun, together with my research collaborator Birgit Tautz (Bowdoin College), to connect key questions about the representation of animals to broader concerns of identity and community in a CBB-Mellon Foundation Grant-sponsored project entitled Thinking Beyond Nation.

Alongside this larger project, I continue my interest in German film with an upcoming presentation at the ACTFL Convention 2008 on Turkish-German filmmaker Fatih Akin (see also recent article on Akin in Glossen).

Between National Fantasies and Regional Realities: The Paradox of Identity in Nineteenth-Century German Literature. (NASNCG 39. Series Editor: Jeffrey Sammons) Oxford: Peter Lang, 2006.

Ernst Moritz Arndt (1769-1860). Deutscher Nationalismus – Europa – Transatlantische Perspektiven. Ed. Walter Erhart Bielefeld. (Studien u. Texte zur Sozialgeschichte der Literatur 112.) Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2007.

For a list of articles and chapters, see my Curriculum Vitae.