Dr. Petra Watzke
"I enjoyed all courses I took as part of the WGST certificate, but I found a course on gender and violence that I took with Deepti Misri specifically impactful. The readings in that course (Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things, J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace, Salman Rushdie's Shame) were haunting and memorable.
We had great and lively discussions in that seminar and the way Professor Misri facilitated the discussions has positively influence my own teaching."
Dr. Petra Watzke is a 2009 graduate of CU Boulder, earning both the Graduate Certificate in Women and Gender Studies and a master’s degree in German studies. She completed her thesis “’Howgh, ich habe gesprochen!’ – German literary representations of Native American ritual and religion" under the advisement of Dr. Beverly Weber, associate professor of German, and faculty associate of women and gender studies.
Following her graduation from CU Boulder, Watzke earned a PhD in German Studies at Washington University in St. Louis, with a dissertation which focused on the representation of women in the context of industrialization in nineteenth-century literature. Watzke relates that the courses she took towards her certificate in women and gender studies significantly influenced her work in German studies: “I used many of the ideas and sources I learned about in my course work for the WGST Certificate to think through primary literature and formulate my arguments. My work since has similarly been focused on unearthing the role of women as active participants in nineteenth and early twentieth-century culture, be it as authors who sound out the limits of women's self-expression in patriarchal society, or early German women filmmakers who use the 'freedom' during the First World War to flip gender roles in their films.”
Now a visiting assistant professor of German at Skidmore College, Watzke is currently teaching a course on gender in the Grimm's fairy tales throughout history. She is also at work on a book project Factory, Household Train: Women Writing Industrial Modernity in Nineteenth-Century German Literature, which developed out of her dissertation. "In this project I unearth women's connections to the developments of industrial modernity as presented in mostly domestic fiction," notes Watzke. "I argue that by presenting female characters interacting with objects of industrialization - be it on train journeys, in work with clocks, or in representations of factories - these women authors challenge the notion of the domestic gender ideal for women."