Candidates: GSA 2022 Elections

Standing for: A. Vice President (2 yrs)

    • Eric Langenbacher
    • Name: Eric Langenbacher
    • Candidate Statement:
      Eric Langenbacher is a faculty member in the Department of Government, Georgetown University, where he completed his PhD in 2002, as well as Director of the Society, Culture, and Politics Program at the American Institute for Contemporary German Studies in Washington, DC, and Managing Editor of German Politics and Society (since 2005). He was a member of the GSA Board from 2016-2018, the Program Committee (2019, 2020), and, currently, the Berlin Program’s selection committee. Recent scholarship includes The German Polity, “Disinformation in Memory Politics and Anti-Democratic Movements,” and A Zeitenwende Indeed: The 2021 Bundestag Election and its Consequences. In the turbulent 21st century, the GSA’s mission—to foster multi-disciplinary scholarship on German-speaking Europe—remains vitally relevant, also because of unprecedented attacks on higher education and specific disciplines. The next president should work with our dedicated colleagues to stabilize and rebuild the association’s activities, stepping up fundraising to keep costs down and increase financial support for junior, underpaid, and remote colleagues. Seizing the post-pandemic moment, the president should also lead a process of reflection so that the association can benefit from lessons learned. We might envision a slightly scaled-down in-person conference, buttressed with hybrid or on-line components, and rethink conference locations.
    • Damani J. Partridge
    • Name: Damani J. Partridge
    • Candidate Statement:
      DAMANI J. PARTRIDGE (Ph.D. University of California, Berkeley, 2003) is Professor of Anthropology and Afroamerican and African Studies and a German Department affiliate at the University of Michigan. His writing examines non-citizenship, sexuality, post-Cold War ‘freedom’, Holocaust memorialization, African-American military occupation, ‘Blackness’ and embodiment, and the Obama moment in Berlin. He directs the Filming Future Cities Project in Berlin and Detroit. In 2012, he published Hypersexuality and Headscarves: Race, Sex, and Citizenship in the New Germany. UC Press will publish Blackness as a Universal Claim: Holocaust Heritage, Noncitizen Futures, and Black Power in Berlin this fall. His funders include the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the Fulbright Foundation, the German Academic Exchange Service, the German Research Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, the National Science Foundation, the School for Advanced Research, and the Wenner-Gren Foundation. For the GSA, he has regularly co-organized seminars, panels, conducted public interviews, and a special webinar on Holocaust Memory, Coloniality, and Black Lives. Having completed his term on GSA’s Board, he serves on its Committee for Institutional Transformation and Social Justice. He plans to continue work towards making the GSA into an organization in which a diverse set of members will systematically thrive.

Standing for: B. Board: Germanistik (3yrs)

    • Alicia Ellis
    • Name: Alicia Ellis
    • Candidate Statement:
      I am an associate professor of German at Colby College where I also chair the Department of German and Russian. I earned a doctorate in German and an MA in African American Studies from Yale University. My first book, Gender and Identity in Franz Grillparzer’s Classical Dramas: Figuring the Female, was published in 2021. As a scholar of the long nineteenth century and, most recently, of Black Europe, my commitment to the discipline is dynamic and shifting. I recently joined the GSA Community Fund Committee. I am also committed to the organization’s diversity, equity, and inclusion goals. A member of the Committee on Institutional Transformation and Social Justice, I have been involved in discussions that tackle questions about race and racialization in the GSA and beyond. If elected as Board Member for Germanistik/Cultural Studies, I wish to explore how a focused expansion of the meaning of German Studies would benefit the organization. Even as diverse approaches to the field are introduced, it is clear that some of the scholarly nuances that un-conventional approaches to the discipline bring are often overlooked. As such, their impact on the intellectual rigor of German Studies disappears from a deeper discourse about the field.
    • Kathryn Starkey
    • Name: Kathryn Starkey
    • Candidate Statement:
      As Professor and Chair of German Studies at Stanford University I have experience working collaboratively with colleagues across periods and disciplines in fostering a strong, diverse, and inclusive intellectual community. I am committed to promoting a scholarly environment where all feel welcome and are able to thrive. My publications have covered a wide range of topics pertaining to medieval and early modern German literature and culture, including text and image, the senses, poetics, gender, visuality, and performance. I am currently co-writing a book (with Fiona Griffiths) on A History of Medieval Germany (900-1220). I have years of experience with the GSA. In 2000 I co-founded (with Sara Poor and William Layher) YMAGINA, a group dedicated to supporting junior colleagues by, among other things, sponsoring annual panels at the GSA. I am now co-coordinator of the newly founded Network of Medieval and Early Modern German Studies, and in this capacity have worked with my colleagues to expand our network and increase our visibility at the GSA. As Board Member, I would represent the earlier periods while working in consort with other members of the board to foster inclusion and diversity of colleagues and scholarship.

Standing for: C. Board: History (3yrs)

    • Tiffany Florvil
    • Name: Tiffany Florvil
    • Candidate Statement:
      As an Associate Professor of European History at the University of New Mexico, I also have interdisciplinary interests in race, diaspora, gender, and sexuality. I have been a member of the GSA since 2010, when I attended my first conference in California. I co-founded the Black Diaspora Studies Network in 2015 and have seen the network grow considerably during these last years. Since 2020, I have been a member of the Committee on Institutional Transformation and Social Justice (ITJS) (formerly the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Committee) and chair of the committee since 2022. I see my work on the Board as building from the work that I have attempted to do with the ITJS committee. I want to continue to make the GSA an inclusive space that is more attentive to issues of racism, ableism, sexism, classism, transphobia, and homophobia. I believe the GSA is capable of more structural changes that reflect a commitment to equity and equality for all our members. I see my position on the Board as aiding me in this commitment to instigate tangible change. I welcome the opportunity to use my position on the Board to advocate for our members who need support and community.
    • Heikki Lempa
    • Name: Heikki Lempa
    • Candidate Statement:
      I am a Professor of History at Moravian University. I have lived a nomadic life like many other German historians. From the University of Turku (Finland) I moved to the University of Chicago (PhD), Columbia University (post-doc), and finally to Moravian University. I have published three books, Bildung der Triebe, Beyond the Gymnasium, and Spaces of Honor. My current book project, The Bodies of the Others, attempts to situate German bodies in a global context. These books and projects reflect my interests in the histories of education, the body, and emotions from the late 17th into the early 20th centuries thereby cutting across the divide between early modern and modern. They also reflect my work at the GSA. Over the past ten years I worked with wonderful colleagues to launch two interdisciplinary networks: Emotion Studies Network and Body Studies Network. I served on the Program Committee and chaired the Seminars Committee for two years. My current concern is the survival of the GSA. How do we keep and grow the membership? How do we expand on the variety of voices? I am interested in bringing in undergraduate panels to the GSA without compromising our academic standards.

Standing for: D. Board: Social Science (3yrs)

    • Daniel Kinderman
    • Name: Daniel Kinderman
    • Candidate Statement:
      Daniel Kinderman is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science & International Relations and Director of the European Studies program at the University of Delaware. He is a political economist who has a longstanding interest in German business, politics, and society. In recent years his research has focused on German business responses to the right-wing populist AfD, with a particular focus on Saxony. He has been a visiting scholar at the Free University Berlin, the Berlin Social Science Center and the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies and a guest professor at the University of Halle. He has received support from the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) as well as from the GSA-affiliated Berlin Program fellowship. He attended the GSA conference in Washington, DC in 2015. If elected to the Board, he will support the organization and its multi- and interdisciplinary orientation to the best of his ability. In addition, he hopes to attend more GSA conferences. This summer he is based at the department of economic geography at the University of Jena. He received an MA and a Graduate Diploma in German and European Studies from York University and a Ph.D. from Cornell’s Government Department.
    • Jonathan Olsen
    • Name: Jonathan Olsen
    • Candidate Statement:
      I serve on the editorial board of German Politics & Society and German Politics, and on the executive board of the International Association for the Study of German Politics (IASGP). In addition, I serve on the executive board of the DAAD Alumni Association (USA) and in that capacity have helped to organize several events for DAAD AA (USA) including a panel at this year’s GSA annual meeting on German foreign policy in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. I have had a long association with the German Studies Association and participated in many GSA annual meetings over the last 25 years. One of my first academic publications was in the GSA’s journal, German Studies Review. In addition, I organized the Political Science section of the GSA for the 2006 and 2012 conferences. My area of research is in German political parties, and I have written on both the Linke and AfD. I’m both a three-time Fulbrighter (once as a student, twice more as a Guest professor) and a German Academic Exchange Service alumnus (also as a Guest Professor). If elected, I would like to attract more political scientists to the organization and to find ways to offer cross-disciplinary collaborations.

Standing for: E. Board: Graduate (2yrs)

    • John Gillespie
    • Name: John Gillespie
    • Candidate Statement:
      John Gillespie (MA, Middle Tennessee State University, 2018) is a fifth-year PhD candidate at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. Gillespie studies twentieth-century German and Czech societies, and his dissertation explores the importance of beer to identity formation and state policies in the postwar Germanys and Czechoslovakia. He authored “Cold (Beer) War: The German Volksgetränk in East German Rhetoric (1945-1971)” in Food, Culture and Identity in Germany’s Century of War (2019) and “Imbibing the Future: Alcohol Moderation and Modernity in 1960s and 1970s East German Broadcast Media and Film” in Contemporary European History (2022). Gillespie has received research grants from the DAAD, MTSU, Vanderbilt University, and the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. Additionally, he won the Southern Historical Association’s Snell Memorial Prize for the best graduate paper in European History in 2019. Gillespie has been a GSA member since 2019, presented at the 2020 virtual conference, and will present again in 2022. He also served as Vice President and President of Vanderbilt’s Graduate History Association from 2019 to 2021. If elected, Gillespie will advocate for initiatives to improve the market-readiness and public outreach of GSA student members and work to further promote equity and inclusivity in the organization.
    • Elizabeth Schoppelrei
    • Name: Elizabeth Schoppelrei
    • Candidate Statement:
      As a Ph.D. candidate who is invested in social justice and has published on German literature (QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking) and poetry as social activism (Fat Studies), I will support the GSA in developing policies that foster feminist, anti-racist, trans-friendly, and accessible environments. I will draw upon my involvement within GSA—from my first presentation (2018) to participating in the seminar “Sexuality Studies and the Law” (2021) and contributing to the upcoming roundtable “The Place of Trans* in German Studies” (2022). If elected, I will serve the GSA in three main ways: backing social justice initiatives, encouraging greater accessibility, and expanding mentorship. In my role, I would support the Committee for Institutional Transformation and Social Justice’s recommendations to the board and ensure open communication channels. Regarding accessibility, I will encourage efforts to make future programs more attentive to accessibility needs (including childcare, all-gender restrooms, quiet rooms, etc.). I will also pursue an expansion of the Community Fund, supporting graduate students and those precariously employed. Finally, I hope to establish wide-ranging mentorship structures while not overburdening those most often called upon to serve in these roles. Caring, intentional mentorship networks are crucial to growing a more diverse German Studies.