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Albert-Ludwigs-Universität
Freiburg: Lehrbeauftragte, Lektorin, Wissenschaftliche Angestelle am Englischen
Seminar
SS 2007
— Tutorial for Survey of English Literature II: Romantic
Poetry to Postcolonial Writings
—
Proseminar: The Drama of Injustice: David Hare, Murmuring
Judges (1991); Jessica Blank, Erik Jensen, The Exonerated: A
Play (2003); Victoria Brittain and Gillian Slovo, Guantánamo:
'Honor Bound to Defend Freedom' (2004)
These three
recent plays, two British and one American, investigate forms of judicial
injustice and unfair imprisonment. David Hare’s play, the second
of a trilogy about British institutions, portrays a young, idealistic
lawyer’s disillusionment in the face of the entrenched problems
and prejudices of the British criminal justice system as well as a woman
constable’s efforts to expose police corruption. The Exonerated
dramatizes the stories of six individuals who were formally on America’s
death row. Guantánamo also puts the actual experience of inmates
on stage, British detainees in the American naval base and detention center
Camp Guantánamo in Cuba. “Honor Bound to Defend Freedom”
is Camp Gitmo’s motto: in the name of so-called freedom, more than
six hundred individuals have been incarcerated without legal representation
by the United States government since 2002. Called “illegal combatants”
they have been deemed to be without the rights guaranteed to both civilians
and prisoners of war by the Geneva conventions. In “verbatim theater”
the stories of several detainees are told through their letters from prison
being read aloud, the sworn testimony of their families, as well as statements
by public officials such as Donald Rumsfeld.
All three plays dramatize how harsh injustice is enacted
in the name of the law or in the so-called war on terror. They challenge
viewers to regard legal institutions critically, to empathize with the
experience of the incarcerated and the underrepresented, and to take political
action. Study of the plays also invite discussions about the relative
value of collective public safety and individual rights. Moreover, the
plays insist that their viewers confront the current attitude of punitivity
towards those considered criminal.
EPG: Inevitably, our readings of these plays will force
us to confront questions about the relations between the literary, the
political, and the ethical. Applied ethical questions will be addressed
with regard to how prisoners should be treated and to what degree states
should guarantee their rights. More general ethical considerations will
arise in respect to our expectations of how political theater and art
should be, for these plays foreground the role of literary artifacts in
political discussions. These plays insist that literary artifacts do not
belong to a separate arena of aesthetic inquiry, but are inextricably
imbedded in the material world.
WS 2006 -2007
—Vorlesung / Lecture Series: Survey of English
Literature I: Beowulf to Eighteenth-Century Drama (zweistündig)
—Tutorial for Survey of English Literature I: Beowulf
to Eighteenth-Century Drama
—Proseminar: Three By Coetzee: In the Heart
of the Country (1977), Foe (1986), Disgrace (1999)
South African Nobel and Booker prize winner, J. M. Coetzee challenges
readers both with his style and his subject matter: apartheid and post-apartheid
South Africa, colonialism and postcolonial violence, master-servant and
animal-human relations, historical scarring, rape, and gender inequity
number among the disturbing themes of his novels. Techniques such as narrator
unreliability, antirealism, and time reversals unsettle reading habits
and expectations as much as do our confrontations with Coetzee's uncomfortable
subject matter. In this course we will discuss the degree to which ethical
questions are ineluctably entwined with aesthetic considerations in Coetzee's
fictions and will perhaps allow ourselves to be unsettled and questioned
by them.
EPG Students: While
avoiding overt political frameworks, Coetzee's fiction forces readers
to consider their positions with regard to apartheid and post-apartheid
South Africa, to colonialism, animal abuse, and sexual violence. Moreover,
his style makes us question how such experiences are and can be adequately
told and read. Such reflections highlight and destabilize the process
by which we make and mediate moral judgments.
SS 2006
—Proseminar: "Eighteenth-Century Animals and
Ethics: Hogarth's "Four Stages of Cruelty", Daniel Defoe's Robinson
Crusoe and Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels
Beginning with a discussion of Rochester's "A Satyr against Reason
and Mankind" (1675) and William Hogarth's "The Four Stages of
Cruelty" (1750), we find that animals are put to various, often contradictory
uses during the eighteenth-century. They may be employed in literature
as vehicles for satire, as mirrors of humankind's failures, or as substitutive
figures for humans considered less worthy: foreigners and women. As Hogarth's
prints show, blood sports in which animals were violently killed such
as cockfighting were enormously popular and cruelty to animals was rampant.
In this course we will trace varied attitudes towards animals by paying
particular attention to two canonical texts: Gulliver's Travels
and Robinson Crusoe.
Whereas Robinson Crusoe equates "savages" and "cannibals"
with wild beasts, and imposes rule over them on his island, Gulliver learns
from the Brobdingnags to think of man as "the most pernicious race
of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface
of the earth.” Moreover, during his fourth voyage, Gulliver comes
to worship the supremely rational Houyhnhnms—noble horses
who coexist without violence—and to be increasingly horrified by
the filthy and vicious Yahoos who so greatly resemble himself. Considering
the status and uses of animals in these texts will help us to ask questions
about gender, alterity, and ethics not only with regard to the eighteenth
century but also with respect to our time.
EPG Schein: Thinking about animals raises questions about our status as
humans. Recently, philosophers like Peter Singer have argued that the
traditional assumption that nonhuman beings are inherently inferior is
analogous to the poor thinking that has informed racist as well as sexist
attitudes. This "speciesism" needs to be overridden. The eighteenth
century saw a nascent movement to humanize animals that has culminated
in the animal rights movement today. The Utilitarian Jeremy Bentham reasoned
that if animals can suffer, and clearly they can, then they deserve rights
and protection just as humans do. We will ask how the 'humane' treatment
of animals reflects on human ethics and we will ponder the question of
how animal rights may be taught in the classroom.
WS 2004-2005
—Proseminar: "Dickens and the Law II: Oliver Twist
and Our Mutual Friend"
—Proseminar: "Working with English Poems: From Sonnets to Free
Verse"
—Tutorial for Survey of English Literature I: Beowulf to
Eighteenth-Century Drama
—Tutorial for American Exchange Students: Integration into the German
University System
SS
2002
—Proseminar: "Experiencing the Body in Poetry and Prose"
—Proseminar: "Introduction to American and English Literary
Studies: Measure for Measure, Shakespeare's Sonnets, The Turn of the
Screw, Nikki Giovanni's poetry"
WS
2001-2002
—Proseminar: "Short Fiction of Henry James"
—Proseminar: "Great Criminals in Literature: Shakespeare’s
Richard III and Shylock, Defoe’s Moll Flanders,
Shelley’s Frankenstein, and
Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde"
SS
2001
—Proseminar: "Exploring the Grotesque in Short Stories of the
American South: Faulkner, Welty, O'Connor, Walker"
—Proseminar: "Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa or, The
History of a Young Lady (1747-1748)"
WS
2000-2001
—Proseminar: "A Selection of Margaret Atwood’s Fiction:
Poetry and Prose"
WS
1999-2000
—Advanced Translation
—Foundation Course: Speaking English (American) (dreistündig)
—Foundation Course: Written English (dreistündig)
SS
1999
—Oral Formulation
—Written Formulation
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Universität Basel, Englisches Seminar: Guest Lecturer
SS
2003
—Hauptseminar: "Dickens and Law I: Bleak House, Little
Dorrit, non-fictional writings"
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Universität Bonn, Englisches Seminar: Gastprofessorin für
das Nordamerikastudienprogramm
SS
2003
—Proseminar: "Confessing Trauma, Confessing Selfhood: Robert
Lowell, Sylvia Plath, Elizabeth Wurtzel, Mara Hornbacher"
WS
2002 – 2003
—Proseminar: "A Case for Lombroso: Frank Norris’s
Deterministic Vision of Crime and Sex"
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Leopold-Franzens-Universität
Innsbruck: Lehrbeauftragte für Sozialpsychologie (Diplomstudiengang
Psychologie)
SS
2001
—Proseminar: "Sozialpsychologie und Sprache"
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