Nominations for ASA Officer and Board 2014
Vice President:
1) Craig Decker
cdecker@bates.edu
2) Gregor Thuswaldner
Gregor.Thuswaldner@gordon.edu
3) Jacqueline Vansant
jvansant@umich.edu
For the Board:
1) Michael Burri
mburri@brynmawr.edu
2) Jennifer Good
Jennifer_Good@baylor.edu
3) Peter Höyng
phoeyng@emory.edu
4) Eva Kuttenberg
ekuttenberg@yahoo.com
5) Dagmar Lorenz
dlorenz@uic.edu
6) Laura McLary
mclary@up.edu
7) Neil Christian Pages
npages@binghamton.edu
8) Felix Tweraser
ftwerase@westga.edu
VP:
1) Craig Decker:
Craig Decker is Professor of German and European Studies at Bates College where he has
chaired the Department of German and Russian Studies, the Program in European Studies,
and served as acting chair of the Division of the Humanities. His scholarship examines
questions of social, political, and cultural democracy in Austria in the nineteenth, twentieth,
and twenty-first centuries. He is particularly interested in the history and theory of the
Volksstück and in representations of the fascist past. In addition to numerous articles on
these subjects, he has edited Balancing Acts: Textual Strategies of Peter Henisch (2002) and
Austrian Identities: Twentieth-Century Short Fiction (2004) and served as editor for
German-language drama for the Columbia Encyclopedia of Modern Drama (2007). He has
translated short stories from German to English as well as three novels: Peter Henisch’s
Steins Paranoia and Eine sehr kleine Frau, and Vladimir Vertlib’s Zwischenstationen.
Craig Decker’s affiliation with the Modern Austrian Literature and Culture Association and
the Austrian Studies Association has been longstanding and varied. After many years on
the editorial board of Modern Austrian Literature, he served as editor of the journal from
2008–11, shepherding it through a period of increased scope and reach. He would bring
the same energy, dedication, interdisciplinary commitment, and attention to detail to the
vice presidency of the Austrian Studies Association.
2) Gregor Thuswaldner
Gregor Thuswaldner is an associate professor of German and Linguistics at Gordon College
in Wenham, Massachusetts and Academic Director and Co-Founder of the Salzburg
Institute of Religion, Culture and the Arts. A native of Salzburg, Austria, he studied German
and English at the University of Salzburg, Bowling Green State University, the University of
Vienna (Mag. phil.) and received his Ph.D. in Germanic Languages from the University of
North Carolina at Chapel Hill. In 2006, Dr. Thuswaldner received Gordon’s Distinguished
Junior Faculty Award. From 2006 until 2012 he chaired Gordon's Department of Languages
and Linguistics. Dr. Thuswaldner has published a number of journal articles and book
chapters on Austrian literature and culture, on Thomas Bernhard, Michael Haneke, Michael
Scharang, Christoph Martin Wieland, linguistics, politics, and religion as well as more than
fifty articles and book reviews in German, Austrian, and American newspapers and
magazines including Salzburger Nachrichten, Die Furche, and Die Zeit. His books include Der
untote Gott: Religion und Ästhetik in deutscher und österreichischer Literatur des 20.
Jahrhunderts, Derrida und danach? Literaturtheoretische Diskurse der Gegenwart, "Morbus
Austriacus" - Thomas Bernhards Österreichkritik, and Making Sacrifices: Notions of Sacrifice
in American and European Cultures. Dr. Thuswaldner is currently writing a monograph on
Stefan Zweig’s years in Salzburg between 1919 and 1934 and, with Robert Dassanowsky,
he is translating Felix Mitterer’s recent play Jägerstätter for the University of New Orleans
Press.
3) Jacqueline Vansant
Since completing my dissertation in 1986 at the University of Texas at Austin, I have
published almost exclusively in the area of Austrian Studies. My most recent research has
been devoted to two projects: 1) the image of Austria in Hollywood film and 2) the group
correspondence among 7 Jewish-Austrian schoolboys who fled Austria after the Anschluss.
In my professional life, I have sought and continue to seek opportunities to create
conversations on Austrian studies across disciplinary borders. To this end, I have organized
panels at professional meetings as well as symposia on exile and “Imaginiertes Österreich:
Imagining Austria” (with the historian Helga Embacher) at the IFK in Vienna. Currently, I
am organizing the annual conference of the ASA for March 2015.
My involvement in the ASA extends back to 1988 when I attended a conference of our
grandparent organization. From 2000-2005 I served as the co-editor of Modern Austrian
Literature with Geoffrey. C. Howes. During this transitional period we initiated the revision
of the by-laws, organized a vote on them as well as the election of a president and board,
set-up the first (rudimentary) website for the journal, and submitted a report to the MLA to
keep our Allied status. We also organized panels at the MLA and the GSA, which reached
across disciplinary boundaries. Most recently I served on the ASA Board (2012-2014) and
suggested an initiative that resulted in free memberships for graduate students. I am eager
to continue and expand my work in the organization. I would like to work on creating more
ways for membership involvement in the organization and reaching out to Allied
organizations to promote Austrian Studies.
Board:
1) Michael Burri
As a scholar, publicist, and teacher committed to the study of Austria, I welcome the
opportunity to serve the Association. My research on Habsburg and republican Austria has
appeared in many venues, including the Austrian History Yearbook, New German Critique,
and German Studies Review, where my contribution received the annual DAAD prize for the
GSR’s outstanding article. I have also presented on Austrian topics at professional
conventions (ASA, GSA, and MLA), and at individual conferences in the US and Europe. But
scholarly research is not the only way I have contributed to advancing Austrian studies.
Another is by increasing awareness about the activities of the ASA to Austrian audiences.
For the Vienna Review, for example, I published a review article on the proceedings of the
2013 ASA conference in Waterloo, Ontario. Last year, I assisted the past ASA president in
recruiting prominent Austrian artists to the new Honorary ASA Membership roll. Faithful
to a time-honored Austrian tradition, I have also written for non-German-language
audiences in Central Europe, above all in review essays published in all three leading Czech
daily newspapers. At Bryn Mawr College, I have expanded course offerings in Austrian
literature and cinema, and burnished its legacy in Austrian studies. As a Board Member I
would seek to support the direction of the organization but also, as our size and
representation among disciplines increases, to listen carefully to and represent the voices
of our members, wherever they may be at home, to the Board and the Association
leadership.
2) Jennifer Good
Jennifer L. Good is associate professor of German in the Modern Languages & Cultures
Department at Baylor University. She received her Ph.D. from the University of
Massachusetts at Amherst, her M.A. from the University of Iowa and B.A.s in German and
Political Science at the University of Missouri, Columbia. She also directs the summer study
program, Baylor in Germany. Relatively new to the Austrian Studies Association, she has
presented papers at the last three ASA conferences and has contributed two book reviews
to the Journal of Austrian Studies. She is currently working on Austrian topics including
teaching Austria in first and second year language classes, an advanced course on Franz
Kafka, and resistance and memory in Elisabeth Reichart’s work. She is interested in the
intersections of politics, society and art in the German-speaking world and has published
on Hannah Arendt, Christa Wolf, and German films of East and West. She leads the Baylor in
Germany summer study in Dresden.
I am honored to be considered for this position on the Executive Board of the Austrian
Studies Association. The ASA conference is the highlight of my conference year and I would
be excited to serve the organization. The insight and knowledge that I have gained from
attending the conference has been pivotal in my development as a teacher and researcher
over the past few years.
3) Peter Höyng
Peter Höyng studied Germanistik and European history in Bonn and Siegen, and continued
his studies in German literature at the University of Wisconsin-Madison where he received
his Ph.D. in 1994. After his years at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville, he joined the
faculty of the German Studies Department at Emory in 2005. In spring 2013, he was a
Fulbright Senior Research Fellow at the Institut für Kulturwissenschaften in Vienna.
Focusing on German literature and culture since 1750, Höyng’s research centers
thematically around four distinct areas: (1) genre-wise, he predominantly explores
dramatic texts within its performative contexts, (2) geographically, his research tilts
towards cultural creations emanating from Austria, (3) topically, he pursues the works of
assimilated German-Jewish figures, and (4) the interaction between literature and classical
music as evident in his ongoing research on Beethoven’s intellectual interests.
Höyng’s integrative approach to different fields is evident in his edited volume on
the Jewish dramatist George Tabori (Verkörperte Geschichtsentwürfe: George Taboris
Theaterarbeit. Tübingen: Francke, 1998), and his monograph that interconnects the
discourses of history and drama: Die Sterne, die Zensur und das Vaterland: Geschichte und
Theater im späten 18. Jahrhundert. Wien, Köln, and Weimar: Böhlau, 2003.
Except for his sabbatical year, Höyng has served as Chair of the German Studies
Department from 2005-2013. In 2006, he was elected to serve on the Executive Committee
from 2007-2009 of the AATG, and in 2010 he participated in a yearlong leadership
program at Emory University.
Due to his research and teaching, Austria has become over the years a home for
Höyng, and he feels inclined to give back to the profession by keeping it intellectually as
vibrant as possible.
4) Eva Kuttenberg
Eva Kuttenberg is Associate Professor of German at the Pennsylvania State University, Erie.
In 1998, she received her Ph.D. from New York University with a dissertation on Arthur
Schnitzler. She is an American-based, native Austrian Austrian studies scholar whose
interests are memory studies, narrative studies, and film studies. Her research on the
literary and cinematic staging of suicide, visual culture in Vienna of the 1920s, the postWorld War II Viennese topography of memory, and contemporary Austrian authors has
appeared in the peer-reviewed journals Austrian Studies, Seminar, Gegenwartsliteratur,
Monatshefte, German Quarterly, Modern Austrian Literature, Women in German Yearbook,
and Unterrichtspraxis. She has contributed chapters to Winning Back Lost Territory: The
Writing of Lilian Faschinger (2014), New Austrian Film (2011, 2014), Literatur und Kultur
im Österreich der Zwanziger Jahre (2007), and A Companion to the Works of Arthur
Schnitzler (2003). In addition, she has published sixteen book reviews and seven film
reviews. Moreover, she is the recipient of a DAAD grant (2002).
As an active scholar, she regularly participates in conferences and has thus far
delivered 27 conference talks at annual conventions such as the German Studies
Association (1997–present), the Modern Languages Association (2002), the Austrian
Studies Association (2003, 2005, 2006), the International Narrative Society (1998, 2005,
2007), and at symposia on Stefan Zweig (2009), and Arthur Schnitzler (2000).
Fully committed to service she has also on occasion reviewed manuscripts for the
Journal of Austrian Studies (formerly Modern Austrian Literature).
5) Dagmar Lorenz
Dagmar C. G. Lorenz is Professor of Germanic Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
Her faculty appointments included Professor of German at Ohio State and Visiting
Professor at the University of Chicago. She publishes on nineteenth- and twentieth-century
German and Austrian literature specializing in German-Jewish writing and literature and
films on the Holocaust. She is a founding member of MALCA, now ASA, and was a board
member and President of MALCA. She regularly attends ASA conferences, where she
presents papers and organizes panels. For JAS she reviews manuscripts and books. Other
offices have included program coordinator for GSA, editor of The German Quarterly, board
member of AATG, Vice President of IVG, and, currently, Vice President of the Kafka Society
of America. Her publications include Keepers of the Motherland: German Texts by Jewish
Women Writers (1997), Verfolgung bis zum Massenmord (1992), Franz Grillparzer, Dichter
des sozialen Konflikts (1986), and Ilse Aichinger (1981). She edited Konzeption
Osteuropa (with Ingrid Spoerk, 2011), From Fin-de-Siecle to Theresienstadt: The Works and
Life of the Writer Elsa Porges-Bernstein (with Helga Kraft, 2007), A Companion to the Works
of Elias Canetti (2004), A Companion to the Works of Arthur
Schnitzler (2003), Contemporary Jewish Writing in Austria (1999), Transforming the Center,
Eroding the Margins (1998), Insiders and Outsiders. Jewish and Gentile Culture in Germany
and Austria (1994). Her current research project “The Elusive Nazi” examines the
representation of Nazi characters in literature and films.
6) Laura McLary
I am an associate professor of German at the University of Portland in Oregon. I earned my
PhD in German at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. My German Studies majors at
UP, more than 50 majors each year, spend a year abroad in Salzburg, Austria. I regularly
teach courses in Austrian literature and culture at UP and in Salzburg. More than 50 of my
graduates have been awarded Austrian-American Educational Commission ETAs, as well as
other prestigious awards (e.g. a Fulbright award to the Diplomatic Academy in Vienna and
Fulbright research grants). I have published articles on Georg Trakl, Marie Pappenheim,
Mary Wigman, and Lilian Faschinger. Articles on Thomas Glavinic and teaching World War
I will appear next year in the Journal of Austrian Studies and in an MLA volume on teaching
WWI. I organized a US-American reading tour for Faschinger in 2009 and co-edited a
collection of essays on Faschinger’s work with Vincent Kling of La Salle University (Ariadne
Press 2014). I have presented on Austrian authors and served as chair on the Modern
Austrian Literature panel at PAMLA and at the ASA. I have conducted research in Salzburg,
Innsbruck, and Vienna, once with the assistance of a Graves Award through the American
Council of Learned Societies. As a skilled administrator, seasoned teacher, and enthusiastic
promoter of Austrian Studies, I am eager to serve the Austrian Studies Association to
support the learning and teaching of Austrian culture, to expand the association’s
membership, and to promote actively the needs of the membership.
7) Neil Christian Pages
Neil Christian Pages is Associate Professor of German and Comparative Literature at
Binghamton University SUNY, where he is also Chair of the Department of German and
Russian Studies. His research interests include Germanophone and Scandinavian cultural
productions, commemorative practices, translation and the history of criticism.
Publications include a number of translations as well as essays on Kierkegaard, Nietzsche,
Georg Brandes, W.G. Sebald, Adalbert Stifter, on Rachel Whiteread’s Shoah memorial in
Vienna and on Michael Haneke’s film Caché. He is co-editor (with Mary Rhiel and Ingeborg
Majer-O’Sickey) of Riefenstahl Screened: An Anthology of New Criticism. Together with
Harald Zils he organizes the annual Binghamton University German Studies Colloquia, now
in its sixth year. He is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Humanities Teaching
Development Fellowship for a project on Kafka. Austrian texts and contexts play a key role
in his thinking and teaching – and he wishes he had more opportunities to teach Austrian
Modernism, the Viennese Avant-garde and the cultures and writers of the Habsburg
Empire. He regularly participates in the meetings of the Austrian Studies Association and
looks forward to continued opportunities to trouble people’s notions of what constitutes
“things German” and to tell undergraduates (and others) that these things are far more
interesting when we look a bit to the south and to the east of...Berlin.
8) Felix Tweraser
I am honored and humbled to be considered. As a child of Vienna and a citizen of the U.S.,
I’ve grown up in and between two polyglot cultures and have devoted my professional life
to studying their manifold encounters.
My research and publications on Arthur Schnitzler, Friedrich Torberg, Elisabeth Reichart,
Elfriede Jelinek, and, more broadly, contemporary Austrian literature and culture, are
animated by current critical paradigms in cultural, media, and gender studies. I am drawn
to imaginative renditions of human consciousness, particularly literature, film, and drama
that critically reflect the construction of individual identity through mass media,
advertising, and dominant institutional forms. Taking issue, for instance, with the scholarly
consensus that Schnitzler’s late works were “apolitical,” I make the case rather that his
texts show the means by which the political suffuses daily life, interpersonal relations, and
institutional development. My current research program is a more hybrid investigation of
Austrian cultural politics during the 1950s and 60s. This period is one of crucial
importance to the emergence of modern Austria that is, for whatever reason, underrepresented in the critical literature, and my interest in Torberg and Reichart describes
their professional activity and depiction of contemporary life, respectively, during that era.
I participate actively in service to the profession, including attending and presenting at the
annual conference of the ASA (as well as other professional organizations), reviewing
manuscripts for publication, and being a public advocate for the study of the Humanities.