“Inclusive Pedagogy Toolkit” with Denise Acevedo, Katie McEwen, and Kayla Wikarcasz. Innovation Room poster session. MLA Annual Convention. New Orleans. January 2025. Proposal accepted.
Proposed Panel. “Beyond Promotion: Creating Holistic Career Pathways for Contingent Faculty.” MLA Annual Convention. New Orleans. January 2025.
Promotion opportunities for contingent faculty are essential for equity in the academic workplace. But what comes with promotion? This panel presents ways for leaders and faculty to create transformative career pathways.
Neurodiverse German Studies Roundtable (1 and 2): Theorizing Neurodivergence in a German Studies Context. German Studies Association. Atlanta, GA. September 26-29, 2024.
A 2-panel series looking at neurodiversity topics in theory and practice in the field of German Studies. Co-organizer with Jennifer Hoyer, University of Arkansas, and presenter.
Invited plenary panel member. “Working Conditions.“ ADE-ALD Summer Seminar. Humanities Leadership for Transformative Change: From Advocacy to Action. Minneapolis-St. Paul, 30 May 2024.
This presentation focuses on the approach outlined in our article in Change: A Magazine of Higher Learning from the perspective of gender.
Invited panelist. Envisioning the Future Academy. May 9, 2024
https://humetricshss.org/envisioning-the-future-academy/
Panel one of a series of panels that is organized by the HuMetricsHSS Initiative. This virtual event will bring together scholars, administrators, and activists at the forefront of creating a more supportive, equitable, just, and values-driven academy. Institutional transformation can be slow and difficult, and yet increasingly we see examples of successful growth, ranging from formally recognizing a broader range of academic work, creating stronger working conditions for contingent faculty and staff, rethinking library collections policies and practices, and transforming policies that allow for stronger faculty governance
Roundtable. “Putting Critical Definitions of World SF into Everyday Practice.” Science Fiction Research Association Conference. Tartu, Estonia. May 10, 2024.
https://www.sfra2024.ut.ee/
Moderated by Ida Yoshinaga with Sonja Fritzsche, Allanah Hunt, Guangzhao Lyu, Reem Monsour, Blaire Morseau, and Cynthia Shin.
Invited Introduction. Screening of Eolomea (Zschoche, 1972) “Stalking Eastern Europe” Prima Vista Literary Festival, Tartu, Estonia. May 8, 2024.
https://elektriteater.ee/filmid/eolomea/
Part of a series of Eastern European science fiction films screened at the festival from May 6-12, 2024. An event open to the public.
“Ethics and ‘radical specificity’ in autoethnographic mother-writing and German autism ‘momoirs’.” Poster Presentation. Coalition of Women in German Annual Conference. Portland, OR. November 4, 2023.
It was great to be back at the WiG conference and we will miss Portland!
Roundtable. “Living Our Values: Leading Efforts for Values-Enacted Institutional Transformation in the Humanities.” 2023 National Humanities Conference. Indianapolis, Indiana. October 27, 2023.
Several HuMetricsHSS Initiative Fellows discuss their initiatives, including the Charting Pathways of Intellectual Leadership approach.
Invited Virtual Talk with Melissa Elliot. “Die Musikvideo-Kulturerbe: Der Diskofilm der DDR.” As part of “Alles nur Unterhaltung? Musikvideos in der DDR. UNESCO-Welttag des audiovisuellen Erbes/Just Entertainment? Music videos in the GDR. UNESCO-World Day of Audio-Visual Heritage.” Hochschule für Film und Fernsehen/Film University Babelsberg Konrad Wolf, Potsdam, Germany. October 27, 2023.
This was a public event held in German with 60 community attendees.
Invited curator and moderator of open plenary roundtable. “Das Erbe der DDR Science Fiction.” (The Legacies of East German Science Fiction.) Science Fiction Research Association (SFRA)/German Society for Fantastik Research (GfF) annual conference. Technical University, Dresden, Germany. August 17, 2023. https://disruptiveimaginations.com/LEGACIES-OF-EAST-GERMAN-SF
Public event held in German at the German Hygiene Museum with 120 attendees (90 community attendees). A transcript of this event will be published in German and in English in the next year.
Roundtable participants included Hardy Kettlitz, Elizabeth Schaber, Erik Simon, Karlheinz Steinmüller, and Evan Torner.
With Tianyi Kou-Herrema. “Diagnosis discourse in writing by parents of autistic children: A medical and digital humanities approach.” Poster presentation. Women in German Annual Conference. Portland, OR. November 12, 2022.
Invited plenary session speaker. “Building Engaged Communities in Disengaged Times.” MLA Academic Program Services (MAPS) Leadership Institute. June 27, 2022. Virtual seminar.
Come to the MAPS Summer Seminar!!! This is a great way to network and learn more about what is going on in the area of language learning across the US and Canada!
“The self-help memoir: Exploring identity and ableism in writing by parents of neurodiverse children.” Poster presentation. Women in German Annual Conference. Virtual Portland, OR, November 4-7, 2021.
Looking forward to great conversations at the poster session as always!
“Parental identity, wellness, and ableism in Silke Bauerfeind’s Ein Kind mit Autismus zu begleiten, ist auch eine Reise zu sich selbst.” German Studies Association Annual Conference. Virtual Indianapolis, IN. September 30-October 3, 2021.
Looking forward to a great exchange of ideas at this session.
Invited Workshop Co-Presenter with Karen Stolley. “Become an Accredited External Reviewer for ADFL.” Pre-Convention Workshop. MLA Convention. January 9, 2020. Seattle, WA.
This workshop has been organized by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages (ADFL). Participants will be ADFL accredited external reviewers upon completion.
Roundtable speaker. “Institutional Contexts and the Shaping and Reshaping of Power.” Sponsored by the MLA Committee on the Status of Women in the Profession. MLA Convention. January 10, 2020. Seattle, WA
Here I will be speaking on the important of Grassroots Leadership and the MSU initiative Cultivating Your Path to Intellectual Leadership (CPIL).
“Staying with the Trouble: Cultivating a Path to Intellectual Leadership (CPIL)” with Christopher P. Long, Bill Hart-Davidson, and Cara Cilano. Prospecting: Extraction, Speculation, and Liberation in the Accelerated Academy. Michigan State University, November 22-23, 2019.
A presentation of the initiative Cultivating Your Path to Intellectual Leadership in the College of Arts & Letters at Michigan State University.
“Bringing Hope and Care to Institutions of Higher Education through an Intentional Intellectual Communities Model.”
Society for Utopian Studies Annual Conference. October 17-19, 2019. East Lansing, MI.
This talk touched upon the university as utopian/dystopian space, the Culture of Care initiative at MSU, and the Davina Cooper’s “Everyday Utopia” model.
“The Education 2035 Initiative at MSU” with Andrew Christlieb, New Frontiers in Packaging Conference, School of Packaging, October 9, 2019.
Panelist. “Women in Data Science.” R-Ladies. Women in Data Science Conference. April 12, 2019. East Lansing, MI.
These presentations grew out of the Education 2035 initiative in AY 18-19 that I co-organized with Andrew Christlieb, Chair of Computer Science, Mathematics, and Engineering at MSU.
Roundtable. “Re-Imagining the Discipline: German Studies, the Humanities, and the University,” Institute for German Cultural Studies (IGCS), Cornell University, September 13-14, 2019.
Panel on research. Discussed the importance of valuing diverse forms of scholarship in the promotion and tenure process to ensure the valuing of diversity of ways of knowing in German Studies.
“The Fascists Are Here!: Revisiting Iron Sky’s Nazis in 2018.” Society for Utopian Studies Annual Conference, November 2018, Berkeley, CA.
In 2012, I presented a paper entitled ironically “The Nazis are coming.” This work looks at the representation of Nazis in the two films from the perspective of a resurgence in contemporary global fascism. A new aspect of this talk will be presented at the upcoming International Conference of Fantastic in the Arts 2019.
Roundtable Participant on “Children’s and Youth Culture: New Directions.” German Studies Association, Pittsburgh, PA September 2018
This wonderful round table organized by Ada Bieber and Benita Blessing anticipates the creation of a needed Children’s and Youth Culture Network at the German Studies Association to recognize the important work being done in this culturally influential area.
“Cellular play: Nature’s agency in Johanna and Günter Braun’s Conviva Ludibundus.” Science Fiction Research Association, Riverside, CA, June 2017
A second article project examining the importance of play in today’s culture to creativity and interdisciplinarity and the critical loss of joy in the everyday.
Organizer and Moderator of Roundtable “New Careers in German Studies and How They are Shaping the Graduate Curriculum.” German Studies Association Annual Conference, October 5-8, 2017, Atlanta, GA.
Rethinking graduate education through cross-institutional collaborations, applied German Studies, interdisciplinary options (Media Studies, etc.)
“Recruiting New Students with ‘German for Human Rights.’” Modern Language Association Convention, January 2017, Boston
This presentation focused on a new course at IWU that I developed to appeal to students who are interested in human rights and social justice issues in the German cultural context. It was developed in part because of new initiatives in this area to recruit students to double major in the German Studies program. This program was inspired by the work of my Spanish colleagues at IWU and their course entitled “Spanish for Social Justice.”