Candidates: 2021 GSA Board Member Elections

Standing for: Cultural Studies/Germanistik Member

    • Hester Baer
    • Name: Hester Baer
    • Candidate Statement:
      Hester Baer (PhD, Washington University, 2000) is Associate Professor of German and Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park, where she also serves as a core faculty member in the Comparative Literature Program. Her research and teaching focus on German cinema and media, feminist theory, and environmental humanities. She is the author of numerous articles and book chapters and of German Cinema in the Age of Neoliberalism (2021) and Dismantling the Dream Factory: Gender, German Cinema, and the Postwar Quest for a New Film Language (2009); co-editor of German Women’s Writing in the Twenty-First Century (2015); and co-editor and translator of Nanda Herbermann, The Blessed Abyss: Inmate #6582 in Ravensbrück Concentration Camp for Women (2000). Her current projects include a monograph on West Germany’s first feminist film, Ula Stöckl’s Neun Leben hat die Katze (1968), and two co-edited volumes, Nuclear Futures in the Post-Fukushima Age and Babylon Berlin. Baer is the recipient of grants from the DAAD and the Fulbright Commission. She has served as the President of the Coalition of Women in German and of the South Central Modern Language Association. She is currently co-editor of the journal Feminist German Studies. Baer has been a regular participant at GSA conferences since 2001. Since 2016, she has served on the Editorial Board of Spektrum: Publications of the German Studies Association.
    • B. Venkat Mani
    • Name: B. Venkat Mani
    • Candidate Statement:
      B. Venkat Mani (PhD, Stanford University, 2001) is Professor of German and World Literature and past director of the Center for South Asia at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His research focuses on two connected approaches to Migration Studies. The first comprises investigations of literatures of migrants and minorities in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The second constitutes construction of world literature through the concept of Bibliomigrancy. Representative of these two lines of inquiry are his monographs Cosmopolitical Claims: Turkish German Literatures from Nadolny to Pamuk (University of Iowa Press, 2007) and Recoding World Literature: Libraries, Print Culture, and Germany’s Pact with Books (Fordham UP, 2017; winner of GSA DAAD Prize and MLA’s Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Best Book in German Studies) and more recently, as co-editor, A Companion to World Literature (Wiley Blackwell 2020). Mani has received fellowships and grants from the Social Science Research Council for a Public Humanities Project for Wisconsin Public Radio on “Inside Islam, Dialogue and Debates”; the Andrew Mellon Foundation’s Sawyer Seminar Grant for “Bibliomigrancy: World Literature in the Public Sphere,” Alexander von Humboldt Foundation’s Experienced Researcher Fellowship for Recoding World Literature. He is also part of UW-Madison’s “Just Futures” project on Humanities Education for Anti-Racist Literacy (HEAL). Starting AY 2021, he will be a Race, Ethnicity and Indigeneity Fellow at the Institute for Research in the Humanities at UW-Madison working on his book project on refuge and forced migration. Mani has participated in every GSA conference since 2005 and has worked with research networks, seminars and organized panel series. He was Chair of the GSA-DAAD Book Prize Committee (2020) and is currently a member of GSA’s first committee on Equity, Diversity and Inclusion.

Standing for: History Member

    • Monica Black
    • Name: Monica Black
    • Candidate Statement:
      Monica Black (PhD, University of Virginia, 2006) is Associate Professor of History at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Her work focuses on the social and cultural history of Germany in the era of the world wars and in the decades just after WWII. In addition to a number of research articles, essays and a co-edited volume, she has published A Demon-Haunted Land: Witches, Wonder Doctors, and the Ghosts of the Past in Post-WWII Germany (Metropolitan / Henry Holt, 2020), and Death in Berlin: From Weimar to Divided Germany (Cambridge, 2010), which won the Wiener Library Ernst Fraenkel and the Hans Rosenberg book prizes. She is currently researching two book projects: one on the intersections of history and psychology; the other a wide-ranging cultural history of modern Germany. Black has received research fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), the American Academy in Berlin, the Shelby Cullom Davis Center at Princeton University, the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), the American Council on Germany, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation/Council for Library and Information Resources, the Berlin Program for Advanced German and European Studies, and the German Marshall Fund, among others. Black has been a member of the GSA since 2004 and has happily attended almost every meeting since then. She has served as chair of the DAAD/GSA article prize committee (2019 – 20), was a member of the DAAD/GSA book prize committee (2012 – 13), and served on the GSA’s Task Force for Graduate Students (2006). Black is editor-in-chief of Central European History (CEH).
    • Terence V. McIntosh
    • Name: Terence V. McIntosh
    • Candidate Statement:
      Terence McIntosh (PhD, Yale University, 1989) teaches in the Department of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His work focuses on early modern Germany, especially its social, religious, and intellectual history in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. His publications include Urban Decline in Early Modern Germany: Schwäbisch Hall and Its Region, 1650-1750 (Chapel Hill, 1997) and several articles and book chapters. His current project, “Disciplining the Parish: Godly Order, Enlightenment, and the Lutheran Clergy in Germany, 1517-1806,” examines the dynamics by which a shifting array of social, theological, and intellectual forces induced prominent churchmen, rulers, and secular thinkers to examine critically and recast significantly the purpose, scope, and nature of Lutheran church discipline at key moments in the early modern period. McIntosh has received research grants and fellowships from the DAAD, the National Humanities Center, the Fritz Thyssen Stiftung, the Franckeschen Stiftungen zu Halle, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. He has participated in ten GSA conferences since 1996.

Standing for: Politics, Economics, Society Member

    • Marie Sumner Lott
    • Name: Marie Sumner Lott
    • Candidate Statement:
      Marie Sumner Lott (PhD, Eastman School of Music, University of Rochester, 2008) is an Associate Professor of Music at Georgia State University in Atlanta, Georgia. Dr. Sumner Lott’s research investigates the musical cultures of nineteenth-century Europe with a focus on the composer Johannes Brahms and his contemporaries. She is the author of The Social Worlds of Nineteenth-Century Chamber Music (University of Illinois Press, 2015) and numerous articles in edited volumes and peer-reviewed journals. Her 2012 article on Brahms’s Op. 51 string quartets, published in the Journal of the Royal Musical Association (U.K.), won ASCAP’s Deems Taylor Award for outstanding writing about concert music. Her current research project focuses on Romantic Medievalism in the music of Brahms and his affiliates; travel to Germany for archival work on this project was supported by a GSU Research Initiation Grant and a Provost’s Faculty Fellowship grant in 2016-17. Dr. Sumner Lott has participated in several GSA meetings as a presenter, panelist, and seminar member. She has experience serving in leadership positions within similar academic organizations, including on the Executive Board of the American Brahms Society (2015-present, Treasurer), the Executive Council of the American Musicological Society (2017-20, Nominating Committee chair in 2020), and within the South-Central Chapter of the AMS (Secretary-Treasurer, 2013-19).
    • Dominic Nyhuis
    • Name: Dominic Nyhuis
    • Candidate Statement:
      Dominic Nyhuis (PhD, University of Mannheim, Germany, 2015) is DAAD Visiting Assistant Professor for German Studies at the Department of Political Science and the Center for European Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Prior to his current appointment, he was affiliated with the Universities of Hannover, Frankfurt/Main, and Vienna. In his research, he focuses on contemporary German politics with an emphasis on political parties and legislative politics. In addition to this work on German federal politics, he is particularly interested in subnational and local politics. In his current research project “Representation and inequality in local politics,” Nyhuis studies disparities in the representation of social groups in German local politics. His research projects are funded by the German Research Foundation and the Volkswagen Foundation. Nyhuis has participated in the GSA since 2019. He co-organized a seminar on “German party politics in times of change and uncertainty” during the 2020 GSA. For the 2021 conference, he co-organized a seminar on “German parliamentary democracy in transition.” He also joined the Program Committee for the 2021 GSA as field co-coordinator for “Contemporary Politics, Economics, and Society.”