Welcome Fall 2016 Graduate Student Cohort!
Lauren Beck
Lauren returns to the University of Michigan, where she recieved her bachelors degree in Russian, Eastern European, and Eurasian Studies and German Honors in 2015. Before returning to U-M, she taught English in Saxony through the Fulbright English Teaching Assistant program. Lauren is broadly interested in visual culture, particularly poster and leaflet art in the interwar period and WWII, and East German literature, among many other areas. She also maintains an interest in Soviet culture and history and often seeks out connections between Germany and Eastern Europe.
Onyx Henry
Onyx completed her BA in German at Wofford College and an MEd in Foreign Language Education at Ohio State University. In the years following, she volunteered with the Ohio Reading Corps through AmeriCorps, and spent a year in Berlin as an English Teaching Assistant with the Fulbright Commission. Most recently, Onyx worked as a German lecturer at Furman University. Onyx’s research interest deals with the representation of Afro-Germans, especially in 19th and 20th century German children's and youth literature.
Elizabeth McNeill
Liz received her BA summa cum laude from the University of Florida in 2013, majoring in History and her own Interdisciplinary Studies major, Gender Representation in History. Upon graduating from UF, Elizabeth developed her language skills by taking German language classes at the Heinrich Heine Universität Düsseldorf and living with a German family as their au pair. Elizabeth studied at the Justus Liebig Universität in Gießen, where she also worked as a bilingual editor and translator at the International Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture. Elizabeth’s research interests revolve around 20th-century literary and visual culture, gender and sexuality, and modernity.
Rhiannon Muncaster
Rhiannon graduated summa cum laude from the University of Illinois at Chicago with a BA in Germanic Studies and Spanish. Her honors thesis, The Evolution of Audiovisual Translation: the Norms and Methods of Amateur Translation in Anime Fansubbing, dealt with the evolving standards of audiovisual translation practice as influenced by amateur, fan translations of Japanese anime through the analysis of German and Spanish fansubs. Rhiannon’s research interests currently lie in the contemporary representations of Arab-Germans, especially in German rap music, and translation theory.
Erik Pomrenke
Erik graduated from the University of Virginia with High Honors in 2014, where he studied German Literature and Anthropology. After his graduation from the University of Virginia, he taught English as an ETA through the Fulbright scholarship in Dresden, Germany, where he developed a great fondness for all things East German. He is interested broadly in the intellectual history of Europe, focusing mainly on intersections of theology, lyrical poetry, and hermeneutics.
Tina Tahir
Tina is an installation artist whose temporary site interventions and textual ruins cross the boundaries of art, design, experimental writing, and critical theory. She received an MFA in Studio Arts from the University of Illinois at Chicago and an MA in Visual and Critical Studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Tahir is a current fellow of the transdisciplinary, intercollegiate Field Trip/Field Notes/Field Guide Consortium hosted by the University of Chicago.
