This scholar/writer in residence program was initiated by a grant from the Max Kade Foundation and generously enhanced by Dr. Charlotte M. Craig. The aim of this program, which generally runs annually each fall semester, is to bring to campus a person active in contemporary German culture. This may be a scholar, writer, or perhaps a journalist or filmmaker. These “Craig-Kade” residents will present a public lecture or teach a course, as well as making themselves available to faculty and students across the university in a number of ways.

Spring 2023 Visitors

Spring 2023 Distinguished Visiting Professor Jan Mieszkowski, Spring 2023 Craig-Kade Scholar in Residence Rosemarie Brucher, and Professor Dominik Zechner enjoying spring in New Brunswick.


 

Upcoming Craig-Kade Events

No events

Spring 2024 - Ina Wudtke

Ina Wudtke

Ina Wudtke is a conceptual artist based in Berlin. She obtained her master’s degree at the Academy of Fine Arts in Hamburg. Her research-based work questions hegemonic political discourses and strengthens counter-discourses on themes such as gender, work, housing and colonialism. From 1992–2004 she was a member of the queerfeminist artists collective NEID and edited the eponymous magazine. In 2011, she released the concept album The Fine Art of Living under her pseudonym T-INA Darling. In 2018, she published a book of the same title on her artistic work about the housing question (Berlin, Archive Books). From 2018 to 2020, she was artistic researcher for documenta professor Dr. Nora Sternfeld at the Art Academy in Kassel. In 2022 her book Worker Writers was published by Motto Books, Berlin.

 

 

 

Spring 2023 - Rosemarie Brucher

RosemarieBrucher02Stephan DoleschalRosemarie Brucher is Vice-Rector for Research at the Music and Arts University of the City of Vienna. She works at the intersection of theatre studies, German literature and cultural studies. She holds a Ph.D. in Theatre, Film and Media Studies from the University of Vienna. Her dissertation focused on Self-injury Performance Art and Immanuel Kant’s aesthetics of the sublime (Subjektermächtigung und Naturunterwerfung. Künstlerische Selbstverletzung im Zeichen von Kants Ästhetik des Erhabenen. Bielefeld: transcript, 2013). She just finished her postdoctoral thesis (Habilitation) on the discursive interrelations between theories of acting and theories of consciousness around 1900 (Theater & Doppeltes Bewusstsein: Zur Verhandlung dissoziativer Phänomene in Schauspieltheorien um 1900). She has worked and taught at the Institute for German Studies at the University of Vienna, at the Department of Theater Studies at the Berlin University of the Arts, and at the Center for Gender Studies at the University of Music and Performing Arts Graz, where she holds a tenure track position. From 2014 to 2015 she was a Max Kade Research Fellow and from 2015 to 2016 a Visiting Professor in the Department of German at New York University. Her academic career includes prestigious awards, fellowships and visiting professorships, such as the Doc-Award of the University of Vienna, the Research Fellowship of IFK Wien (Vienna International Research Centre for Cultural Sciences), the Käthe Leichter Guest Professorship of the University of Vienna and the Max Kade Fellowship of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. Her research interests are Performance Art, Viennese Actionism, Aesthetics, Subject and Difference Theory, Gender, Queer & Trans Studies, as well as the interconnection between Art, Philosophy and Psychology around 1900. 

 

 

© Stephen Doleschal


 

Spring 2022 - Renata Schmidtkunz

SchmidtkunzRenata Schmidtkunz was born in Hattingen/Ruhr in 1964 and grew up in Lutheran parsonages in Lower Austria, Upper Austria, and Carinthia. She then went on to study protestant theology in Vienna and in Montpellier, France.

RADIO & TELEVISION

Schmidtkunz has worked for the ORF (Austrian public broadcast corporation) as a presenter, host, and documentary film director since January 1990. She began at ORF Television’s Religion Department, where she (co-)wrote, produced, and presented numerous regularly scheduled shows that still exist today—examples of which include kreuz und quer and Religionen der Welt.

From 1990 to 2012, Schmidtkunz also worked on the ORF’s 3sat staff as a presenter and filmmaker. And beginning in 1995, she began working for her favourite radio station Ö1: as presenter of the Radiokolleg programme (daily one hour science show), as an author and producer of contributions to the magazine show Journal-Panorama, and as a moderator of discussions for the Radio show Im Gespräch (for which she has been responsible since December 2013). Schmidtkunz also spent five years hosting the ORF’s Club 2, which is often referred to as the “mother of all talk shows” on German-speaking television.

Her long-term film documentary project Das Weiterleben der Ruth Klüger was given its world première at the Vienna International Film Festival VIENNALE in 2011.

AWARDS

She has been a co-recipient of the Special Prize of the Jury at the “Romy” film and television awards (1999) and of the Österreichischer Frauenring’s “Frauenring” award for feminist engagement together with Paul Gulda (2011). Her awards as an individual include the 2012 “Preis der Stadt Wien für Publizistik“ (a journalism award conferred by the City of Vienna) as well as the television award “Axel Corti Preis” in 2014 and the “Radiopreis der Erwachsenenbildung” in 2019.

In 2019 Renata Schmidtkunz published her book “Heavenly free! Why we do need transcendency again” (Himmlisch frei! Warum wir wieder mehr Transzendenz brauchen).

 


Fall 2019 - Martin Mittelmeier

Martin Mittelmeier 002Martin Mittelmeier (born 1971 in Munich) is an editor and author. He worked for prestigious German publishing houses (Luchterhand Literaturverlag, Eichborn), where he was especially responsible for German literature. He now is a freelance editor. As author he published several essays on philology and philosophy (http://idsl1.phil-fak.uni-koeln.de/30479.html), his most recent books are “Adorno in Naples” (Ph.D. thesis) and “Dada. A century’s tale”, both published by Siedler Verlag, Munich. He also works as assistant lecturer at the University of Cologne and teaches Creative Writing at several German Universities.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 © Oliver Favre


 Fall 2018 - Markus Kupferblum

IMG 0468Markus Kupferblum (born 12 June 1964) is an Austrian theatre and opera director, playwright and clown. He founded the first Austrian Fringe Opera Company "Totales Theater" in Vienna and is an expert in Commedia dell'arte and mask theatre. Since 2013 he is the founder and director of the interdisciplinary music theatre ensemble "Schlüterwerke" in Vienna.

He has directed and shown productions in France, Austria, Germany, England, Spain, Belgium, the United States of America, Korea, Armenia, Lebanon, Iran, Israel, Russia, Lithuania, Luxemburg, Peru, Switzerland, and Italy.

He was awarded the "1. Prix de l'Humour" at the Avignon Festival in 1993 and is known for working across the genres of opera, circus, theatre, and film and exploring unusual performance spaces for his productions.

In 2007 he received the "Nestroy Award" for the best German-speaking fringe production for his play "The Abandoned Dido"

In 2012 he founded the "European Theatre Day of Tolerance" which is commemorated on every 1st February. On this occasion a Memorandum for peace and tolerance is being read before the performances of almost 1.000 theaters throughout Europe and beyond.

In 2013 he published his book "The birth of curiosity - the history of the Commedia dell Arte as political revolutionary popular theatre" at the Editor "Facultas, Vienna University Press"

He was teaching acting, directing and creative writing e.g. at the University of Vienna, the Max Reinhardt Seminar. University of Music and Performing Arts, Vienna, University of Applied Arts, Vienna, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, USA, Michigan University, Ann Arbor, USA, Southeastern Louisiana University, Hammond, USA, Hochschule für Musik und Darstellende Kunst Frankfurt, Theaterakademie August Everding München, Escuela Nacional del Teatro de Bolivia, and others.

Since 2018 he is Senior Lecturer at the University of Music and Performing Arts, Vienna, where he is teaching opera directing and drama for singers.

He is member of the International P.E.N. Club.


Fall 2017 - Michael Speier

FotoSpeierSchindler1Michael Speier is a literary scholar, poet and translator, living in Berlin. He holds the Staatsexamen and a Ph.D. in German Literature from the Freie Universität Berlin. Having taught at the Freie Universität Berlin, the University at Leipzig, and several U.S. universities (Dartmouth College and Georgetown University among them), Michael Speier is also Adjunct Professor at the German Department of the University of Cincinnati. In addition to having published a number of anthologies and translated modern English, French, and Italian poetry, he is the founding editor of the Paul Celan-Jahrbuch and the literary magazine Park. 

His primary scholarly interests include symbolism, expressionistic prose, translation theory and practice, the image of the city in literature, and modern poetry, especially Paul Celan. His teaching interests also include creative writing. The author of numerous articles and reviews, he has written or edited the following books: Die Ästhetik Jean Pauls (1979), Kehr um im Bild (with Dieter Straub, 1983); Im Übersetzen leben. Übersetzen und Textvergleich (with Klaus Berger, 1986); Berlin!Berlin! Eine Großstadt im Gedicht (1987); Poesie der Metropole (1990); Berlin mit deinen frechen Feuern (1998); Interpretationen: Gedichte von Paul Celan (2002); and Berlin, du bist die Stadt (2011).

He has published nine volumes of poetry (most recently: Laokoons Laptop, 2015; Haupt/Stadt/Studio, 2012;  Welt/Raum/Reisen, 2007). His work has appeared in over 50 anthologies and has been translated into twelve languages. He received the Schiller Award (Weimar), the Alfred-Döblin-Grant (Akademie der Künste, Berlin), Hermann-Hesse-Grant,  Stichting Culturele Uitwisseling-Grant and was writer in residence in the USA, France and Hungary.  He was awarded the "Literaturpreis der A + A Kulturstiftung" in Spring 2011 and is Honorary Fellow of the American Association of Teachers of German.


Fall 2016 - Rupert Gaderer

gadererIn the Fall 2016 semester, Rupert Gaderer joined the Rutgers German Department from the Ruhr-University Bochum, where he was Visiting Professor in the Department of Media Studies. He was a fellows at the Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW, Vienna), the International Research Center for Cultural Studies (IFK, Vienna), the Humboldt-University of Berlin, the Institute for Cultural Inquiry (ICI, Berlin), and the graduate school "Mediale Historiographien" (Weimar/Erfurt/Jena). 

He received his PhD in German Literature from the University of Vienna with a dissertation on the relations between natural sciences, aesthetics, and literature around 1800. His current book project deals with the intersections between media, law, psychiatry, and literature, especially concerning cases of troublemakers, quarrellers, and vexatious litigation. Further research and teaching interests include media theory, media history, and media philology.

Books: Querulanz. Skizze eines exzessiven Rechtsgefühls (2012), Poetik der Technik: Elektrizität und Optik bei E.T.A. Hoffmann (2009). Edited volumes: Paranoia. Lektüren und Ausschreitungen des Verdachts (2016), Phantasmata. Techniken des Unheimlichen (2011), Hauntings I: Narrating the Uncanny Figures and Twilight Zones. Special Issue, Image & Narrative Vol. 13/No. 1 (2012). Together with Friedrich Balke he is editing the volume Medienphilologie. Konturen eines Paradigmas, to be published by Wallstein in 2017.


Fall 2015 - Evelyn Annuss

annussEvelyn Annuss works at the intersection of theater studies and German literature. Her research interests include nondramatic literature from antiquity to the present, theories of drama and quotations of aesthetic forms, global perspectives on the entangled history of cultural performances, postcolonial critique and visual politics, mass culture and stagings of collectivity as well as contemporary forms of art and activism. She has taught at the Institute for Theater Studies at the Ruhr-University of Bochum and the Center for Interdisciplinary Women's and Gender Studies at the Technical University of Berlin. Her dissertation focused on Elfriede Jelinek's Theater of Afterlife (Fink 2007, 2nd edition). Holding a Ph.D. from the University of Erfurt, she just finished her postdoctoral thesis (Habilitation) on Nazi Mass Stagings and Media Dispositives in Bochum and is co-editor of a special issue on National-socialism and Gender for the German-speaking journal Feministische Studien. She curated the international photo exhibition Stagings Made in Namibia (National Art Gallery of Namibia / Berlin Bethanien; catalogue b_books 2009), which was shown in a new version at the Palais des Nations in Geneva and at the Basler Afrikabibliographien on Namibia's 25th Independence Day in 2015. Her current work deals 1) with the relation of masking and marking in the history of literature, theater and pop culture; 2) with stagings of refuge.


Fall 2014 - Anna-Sophie Springer

cv-photoAnna­-Sophie Springer (b. West-­Berlin, 1980) is a writer, editor, curator, and co-­director of K. Verlag, an independent Berlin-based press exploring the book as a site for exhibition making. Her practice merges curatorial, editorial, and artistic interests by stimulating fluid relations among images, artifacts, and texts in order to produce new geographical, physical, and cognitive proximities, often in relation to historical archives. She is Associate Editor of publications for the 8th Berlin Biennale. Before launching K. in 2011, she worked as Editor for the pioneering German theory publisher Merve Verlag.

Anna-­Sophie is also a member of the HKW's SYNAPSE International Curators' Network where she co-­edits the intercalations: paginated exhibition book series co-published by K. in the framework of the HKW's "Anthropocene Project." As a curator, her previous exhibitions include the touring group show Ha Ha Road (UK, 2011–12), on the subversive power of humour; The Subjective Object (GRASSI Ethnographic Museum Leipzig, 2012), on display practices and the archive; as well as the series EX LIBRIS (Galerie Wien Lukatsch and others, 2013), exploring various libraries as curatorial spaces. Her writing and interviews have been published in C Magazine, Fillip, and Scapegoat. Her forthcoming exhibition project 125,660 Specimens of Natural History will open at Komunitas Salihara, in Jakarta, Indonesia, in August 2015. Her collection of interviews, TRAVERSALS: Conversations on Art and Writing, will be released in September 2014, and she is currently finalizing the production of her exhibition-book Fantasies of the Library as the inaugural publication in the intercalations series (October 2014). She received her M.A. in Contemporary Art Theory from Goldsmiths College, University of London, and her M.A. in Curatorial Studies from the Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst, Leipzig.


Fall 2013 - Anna Glazova

glazovaAnna Glazova holds a Phd in German and Comparative Literature from Northwestern University, Evanston, IL. She writes on questions of tradition, translation, and quotation in poetry and fiction. Glazova has published articles on Paul Celan, Osip Mandelstam, Franz Kafka, Heinrich von Kleist, and Walter Benjamin.  She has translated into Russian works by Kafka, Celan, Robert Walser and Unica Zürn.  Glazova is the author of three volumes of poetry in Russian. Her poems appeared in English translation in a volume entitled Twice under the Sun (London, 2008). Currently she is working on completing her book, Counter-Quotation in Paul Celan's Poetry of Encounter.


Fall 2012 - Karin Schiefer

schieferKarin Schiefer is a film journalist and translator. She studied Romance languages, German, Art and Media Management in Vienna, Lyon and Salzburg. Since 1999 she heads the section for publications in the Austrian Film Commission and has published on contemporary Austrian cinema during this period. She teaches journalism at the Filmakademie; she also works as a moderator and translator from French into German. Her book Filmgespräche zum österreichischen Kino appeared with Synema in Vienna 2012.  


Fall 2011 - Dr. Christophe Fricker

frickerDr Christophe Fricker is a German author writing on friendship and travel, a language and literature teacher, and a translator. His most recent book is an introduction to the works of the controversial and inspiring poet, Stefan George. Stefan George: Gedichte für Dich appeared with Matthes & Seitz Berlin in spring, 2011. Previously, Fricker had edited the correspondence between Friedrich Gundolf and Friedrich Wolters, two friends of George’s (Böhlau, 2009).

Fricker’s first collection of poetry, Das schöne Auge des Betrachters, was published by J. Frank in 2008. It was awarded the 2009 Hermann Hesse Förderpreis. Larkin Terminal — Von fremden Ländern und Menschen, a collection of portraits of places and people, was published in 2009 by Leipzig-based Plöttner Verlag. In 2007, Fricker was awarded a Merkur Essay award for an article on Singapore.

Having studied Political Science, German, and Musicology at Freiburg, NUS (Singapore), and Dalhousie (Halifax, NS), he wrote his doctoral dissertation on Stefan George at St John’s College, Oxford. From 2006 until 2010 he was first a post-doc and then Acting Director of the German Language Program at Duke University.

Fricker received an award by Junges Literaturforum Hessen Thüringen (1995). He was a Killam Scholar and a Lamb & Flag Scholar, President of the Oxford University German Society, editor of Zeichen & Wunder (1996-2001) and Castrum Peregrini (2000-2006), Assistant Editor of The German Quarterly (2006-2009), and Translator-in-residence at Junge Oper Rhein-Main (2004-2005). He translated Gilbert & Sullivan’s Schwurgericht (Trial by Jury) and Domenico Cimarosa’s Operndirektor in Nöten (L’impresario in angustie) for productions by Junge Oper Rhein-Main. He is the German translator of various contemporary American poets, including Dick Davis, Timothy Steele, Robert B. Shaw, and Joshua Mehigan. Photo copyright Marie Isabel Schlinzig.


Fall 2010 - Andrea Grill

AndreaGrillAndrea was born in Bad Ischl, Austria in 1975. She studied in Salzburg (Austria), Perugia (Italy), Thessaloniki (Greece) and Tirana (Albania) and graduated with a Master’s degree in ecology. She lived several years in Cagliari (Sardinia) and in 2003 obtained her PhD in biology at the University of Amsterdam (The Netherlands).

Since then she has worked as a researcher and lecturer at the University of Neuchâtel (Switzerland) and in Bologna (Italy). She writes novels, poetry, essays, book reviews. Her essays, stories, and poetry have appeared in newspapers and journals. She has published three novels: Zweischritt (2007),Tränenlachen (2008), and Das Schöne und das Notwendige (2011). Grill also translates from Albanian into German. She has lived in Tirana, Cagliari (Sardinia), Neuchatel, Bologna, and today resides in Vienna. 
   


Fall 2009 - Michael Stavarič

StavaricMichael Stavarič was born in what is now the Czech Republic and immigrated to Austria as a child. He studied Studied Bohemistics and Publishing at the University of Vienna.  In Vienna, he works as a writer and translator for several journals and publishing houses.  Michael Stavarič has translated and published books by Patrik Ourednik and essays by Jiri Grusa.  For his own writings, he has already won several prestigious awards including the International Poetry Competition in Dublin (2002), the Literaturpreis der Akademie Graz (2003), the Literaturpreis Wartholz (2009), the Hohenemser Literature Prize (2009, received jointly with Agnieszka Piwowarska), and the Austrian State Prize for Children's Literature (2009).   In 2007, he won the Österreichische Kinder Jugendbuchpreis and the Österreichische Buch Preis.  In the same year, he was nominated for the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize.  His works include Europa – eine Litanei, Stillborn and Gaggalagu.   He is currently working on the literature of Petra Hulova, and a second translation will be published in 2010. Photo copyright www.lukasbeck.com


Fall 2007, Fall 2008 - Dr. Elke Brüns

BruensDr. Brüns has been teaching at the Ernst-Moritz-Arndt-Universität Greifswald, where she received her postdoctoral lecture qualification (Habilitation) in 2005. In 2005 and 2006 she worked as editor for the Max-Planck-Gesellschaft. In 1996 she received her Ph.D. from Freie Universität Berlin.

Since 1990 she has been writing articles as a free-lance journalist. She has published articles on authors from the 18. to the 20. Century, Gender Studies, Film, and Cultural Studies.

 


Fall 2006 - Dr. Michael Levine

Michael Levine is now a Professor in the German Department. Click here to view his full profile.


Fall 2005 - Dr. Daniela Strigl

Dr. Daniela Strigl studied German philology, history, philosophy, and theater at the University of Vienna. In 1992, her dissertation entitled “Wo niemand zuhaus ist, dort bin ich zuhaus” was published by Böhlau in Vienna. She has published numerous articles about Austrian literature in magazines and newspapers including “The Standard”, “Time”, “The Press”, and “Literature and Critique.” In 2001, she won the Austrian State Prize for Literature Critique, and in 2007 she won the Max Kade Prize. Her most recent publications as an Assistant Professor at the Institute for Germanic Studies at the University of Vienna are Im Keller: Der Untergrund des literarischen Aufbruchs nach 1945 (2006) and In welcher Sprache träumen Sie? (2007).


Fall 2004 - Carmen-Francesca Banciu

Dr. Carmen-Francesca Banciu is originally from Lipova, Romania where she began writing at a young age. She then began writing in German in 1996 after moving to Berlin six years earlier. Her background and residence in Berlin are essential to the autobiographical fiction in the novel Ein Land voller Helden and memoirs Berlin ist mein Paris: Geschichten aus der Hauptstadt. Her works are often political in content as in Vaterflucht (1998), a novel which tells the tale of broken childhood under the Communist Party, or Das strahlende Ghetto (1985), which earned her a publishing ban in Romania after winning the International Short Story Prize of the city of Arnsberg in Germany. She writes for the radio and newspapers, and has given talks and workshops all over the world, from Berkeley University, CA to the University of Athens in Greece.


Fall 2003 - Michael Hofmann

Michael Hofmann has been writing and translating works since 1983 after an education in English Literature and Classics at Magdalene College, Oxford, and postgraduate studies at the University of Regensburg and Trinity College in Cambridge. He was acknowledged as a distinguished poet with the Cholmondeley Award for Nights In The Iron Hotel (1983). This award is given annually by the Society of Authors in the United Kingdom and in 1985 Michael Hofmann was one of three recipients. He also was awarded The Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, another British literary achievement, for Acrimony (1986) in 1988. In 2008, the volume Selected Poems was published and his latest book, published early in 2009, is a translation of Alone In Berlin by Rudolf Ditzen, who wrote under the name Hans Fallada. In a 2005 interview by Mark Thwaite, Michael Hofmann discussed the satisfaction he gets from translating works, including those of Kafka, Brecht, or Wolfgang Köppen, and though the process seems potentially endless, he dedicates himself to it with the highest hopes. His translations have been twice recognized with the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize and he is currently nominated for a third in 2009 for Fred Wander’s The Seventh Well


Spring 2003 - Dr. Hanno Loewy

Hanno Loewy is originally from Frankfurt, Germany, where he studied Literary Science and Theater, Film, and Television Science. In 1995, he became the founding director of the Fritz Bauer Institute in Frankfurt and held this position until 2000 when he became an instructor at University of Konstanz. He was the leader of the Section for Remembrance in 2003 and the head of the Jewish Museum of Hohenem in 2004. His work is focused around the history of film theory, the reception of the Holocaust in literature, and film and photography. Some of his titles include: Taxi nach Auschwitz: Feuilletons (2002) and Béla Balåzs - Ritual und Film (2003).