Graduate Students

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...

Erik Flöter, originally from Würzburg, Germany, has been studying German and History at the University of Regensburg to become a teacher since 2020. He also worked as a student assistant at the History Department at the University of Regensburg. His interests include 18th and 19th century German drama and poetry, with a special focus on Heinrich Heine and political poetry of his time and the History of Central and Eastern...

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...

Augustus Haines comes from rural Western North Carolina and attended schools between Asheville, N.C. and Knoxville, T.N. before earning his B.A. in German Studies from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. During undergrad, his studies focused predominantly on Swiss literature and culture as well as multiculturalism and immigration in contemporary Germany. He is still interested in these areas but today his specialities include mountaineering and alpinism in German culture, visual culture...

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...

Ben received his BA in German and Global Studies from Wayne State University and studied abroad in Munich for his junior year. He has had internships as a research assistant at both the Deutsches Museum in Munich and the Detroit Institute of Arts, and focused on German and European history and colonialism during his time at Wayne State. His research interests include the rise of nationalism and populism, theories of...

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...

Oliver Ozellis is from Kassel, Germany and studies German and history. He earned his bachelor's degree from the Johannes Gutenberg-University of Mainz in 2021 and started his master right after. In addition, he has a degree in journalism. He will work for our department as a teaching assistant. He wrote his bachelor thesis on the didactic handling of Bertolt Brecht. His favorite author besides Brecht is Theodor Fontane.

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.

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.