Sonja Fritzsche is Associate Dean for Academic Personnel and Administration and Professor of German Studies in the College of Arts & Letters at Michigan State University and a former Department Chair at two institutions. Her administrative work focuses on the creation of more inclusive and equitable higher education structures, policies, pedagogies, and practices through “transformative listening.” She focuses on creating habits of diversity, equity, and inclusion across the College, on non-tenure-stream and tenure-stream mentoring and career pathways, and on the Culture of Care initiative and Charting Pathways to Intellectual Leadership (CPIL) model. She is also as co-PI with the Big Ten Academic Alliance Less Commonly Taught and Indigenous Languages Partnership grant (PI: Christopher P. Long, 2019-2024) funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Among other aspects, this iteration of the grant focuses on supporting Anishnaabemowin instruction in communities and institutions as well as creating cross-institutional partnerships to sustain and support Less Commonly Taught Language instruction as central to the DEI mission of MSU and higher education.

Fritzsche’s intellectual leadership includes mentorship and stewardship as President of the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages in 2015, as past Vice President of the Science Fiction Research Association, and currently on the Steering Committee of the Coalition of Women in German. She is author of Science Fiction Literature in East Germany (Peter Lang Oxford, 2006), editor of The Liverpool Companion to World Science Fiction Film (Liverpool UP, 2014/pbk. and ebook 2021), and co-editor of Science Fiction Circuits of the South and East (Peter Lang Oxford, 2018) with Anindita Banerjee and The Routledge Companion to Gender and Science Fiction (2023) with Lisa Yaszek, Keren Omry, and Wendy Gay Pearson. Her current project takes a medical humanities approach to affect and autism life writing.