Graduate Students

Julius Arnold is originally from Regensburg, Germany and has been studying German, history, social science and education to become a teacher at the university of his hometown since 2018. Before coming to Colorado, he worked as a student assistant at the Department of History Didactics at the University of Regensburg and served as a student representative. He is particularly interested in the Enlightenment.

Aubrie Blauvelt holds a BA in both German and Folklore & Ethnomusicology from Indiana University all the way in Bloomington, Indiana. In her time in Indiana, she focused primarily on storytelling in Folklore, with a specific interest in German folklore and its connection to German culture. She also co-founded and led an LGBTQ+ youth group in the town of Bloomington, which then led her to research positions within her university...

Stefan Bongers is a PhD candidate in the German department. He got both his BA and MA in German and English from the University of Basel where he focused on literary studies in both subjects. He wrote his MA thesis on contemporary German autofictions. Before coming to Colorado, he worked as a student assistant at the University of Basel and at Literaturhaus Basel where he was part of a team...

Originally from Colorado, Sean Bray earned a BA in Political Economy and German Studies from Tulane University. He has studied in Berlin and Regensburg, using that time to focus on topics of East German literature, film, and society. His research interests include the political economy of authoritarianism, expression under conditions of censorship, and historical conceptions of the state.

Taylor Budde joined the German Studies PhD program in 2018 after receiving his BA at the University of Minnesota and MA at the University of Colorado Boulder. His work and interests involve intersections of myth, science, and culture in the 19 th and 20 th century, serialized, pulp, and “Weird” fiction, occultism, monsters, and film studies. His Master’s thesis titled Of Monsters and M ä rchen explored the relationship between...

Vera Geranpayeh is from Göttingen, Germany where she also earned her bachelor’s degree in English Philology and North American Studies. She will work as a TA for our department, with experience teaching German and English to high schoolers and Ukrainian refugees. She has also taught Critical Theory at Göttingen University. Her interests include human-object relations, animacy, religious mythology, and female (post-)modernist war narratives. She has previously lived and studied at...

Janine Kennedy holds a BA in English Literature from Fairfield University and an MS in Applied Mathematics from the of University of Colorado at Denver. She was Math Department Chair at Abraham Lincoln High School where she taught Algebra, Precalculus and AP Calculus to ELA- E students from Denver’s Latinx and Vietnamese communities. Her time at ALHS increased her awareness of the complex issues facing migrant and refugee communities, especially...

Trevor graduated from Montclair State University with a Bachelor’s degree in German with a minor in environmental justice in 2021. While at Montclair State, Trevor was a teaching assistant for the German Department, taught a Beginning German course at the Adult School of Montclair, and was also a peer advocate at the LGBTQ+ Center in the Office for Social Justice and Diversity on campus. His research interests include gender and...

Alexandria Koch holds a BA in German Studies and Anthropology from Indiana University, Bloomington. She is interested in the grammatical and social relationship between gender-nonconforming pronouns, like they/them, and the gendered German language structure. They hope to combine both the German and Anthropological interests in the future as she continues her studies.

Mari McCarville is originally from Colorado, but she has lived in Germany and Austria. She earned Bachelor’s degrees in music and psychology and a Master’s degree in Curriculum and Instruction from the University of Denver. During her teacher education program, she specialized in culturally and linguistically diverse education, and she recently received her Colorado teacher license. She is particularly interested in studying German pedagogy and researching her Austrian family heritage...

Elisa Riga holds a BA from the university of Liège in Belgium (ULG) and an MA from the Johns Hopkins University. For her Bachelors, she double-majored in English and German literatures at the ULG, and also completed coursework at the university of Göttingen in Germany. Her graduate studies at JHU and CU Boulder have included work on Viennese modernism, critical theory and theories of translation. Riga has conducted research on...

Alex Sellers is a student and graduate of the University of Chicago's Comparative Literature department. He also holds an MA from CU's School of Education. His interests include modern and contemporary fiction and film, with a particular focus on coming-of-age narratives and theories of emotion and emotionality. Outside of Colorado, he has lived in New York, Chicago, and Berlin.

Petra Sertic is a curator and art historian based in Denver, Colorado with an interest in German art and culture of the 1980s. As Associate Curator at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art (2010-2013) and Curatorial Assistant at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver (2007-2009) she has organized over 50 exhibitions by national and internationally acclaimed artists. She is a member of the Public Arts Committee of Denver’s Office of...

Leilani Spurlock graduated from Indiana University in 2022 with a BA in Germanic Studies and a BM in Trumpet Performance. While at IU she authored a thesis discussing the representation of female musicians in German orchestras. Her research interests include gender representation in German media, German language pedagogy, and second language acquisition with a focus on sociocultural analysis of language.