1. Vice President

Sara F. Hall (Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley, 2000) is Associate Professor of Germanic Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where she chairs the minor in Moving Image Arts. From 2017-2019 she served as Interim Director of UIC’s School of Literatures, Cultural Studies and Linguistics, having previously served as Associate Dean for Academic Affairs in the UIC Honors College and Director of the Office of Undergraduate Research in the Office of the Vice Provost for Undergraduate Affairs. She co-authored a Mellon-funded Engaged Humanities Initiative grant for undergraduates and has received support for her own research from the DAAD and the Berlin Program for Advanced German and European Studies. Her two dozen articles and essays on silent film, New German Cinema, contemporary television, gender and economics, and intermediality have appeared in academic anthologies and journals including German Studies Review, German Quarterly, The Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, and Modernism/Modernity. Her recent article in the journal Communication: The European Journal of Communication Research won the 2019 Society for Cinema and Media Studies Central/South/East European Essay Prize. She serves on the editorial board of Screen Bodies: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Experience, Perception, and Display and as a peer reviewer for journals in film studies and German Studies as well as for major funding agencies. Since 2003, she has organized and/or participated in a dozen panels at the GSA annual conference on topics such as German film theory, early women filmmakers, and German film and the law. She co-chaired the 20th and 21st Century Germanistik and Cultural Studies section of the Program Committee from 2013-2015 and served a term on the GSA Executive Board from 2016-2019. Moreover, she served on the GSA Treasurer search committee in 2018 and chaired the Graduate Student Essay Prize selection committee in 2019.

Derek Hillard (Ph.D., Indiana University, 2001) is Professor and Head of the Department of Modern Languages at Kansas State University. His first monograph is Poetry as Individuality: The Discourse of Observation in Paul Celan (Bucknell UP, 2010). He was awarded a DAAD grant to carry out research at the Freie Universität Berlin in 2001 and a Marbacher Stipendium in 2010. Since his first GSA in 1999, he has participated in numerous GSA panels, round tables, and seminars. Interested in the intersection of literature, arts, history, and studies of emotions, he co-founded with colleagues in history an interdisciplinary GSA network, the Emotions Studies Network. Interactions with GSA colleagues led to a recent co-edited volume (with Heikki Lempa and Russell Spinney), Feelings Materialized: Emotions, Bodies, and Things in Germany (Berghahn, 2020), with contributions from scholars who had presented research at interdisciplinary Emotions Studies events. Such collaborations in emotions studies continue with a second project—likewise the result of recent GSA interdisciplinary seminars—to be co-edited with Erika Quinn and Holly Yanacek. In addition to research on Paul Celan and emotions studies, he has published on German modernists, such as Alfred Döblin and Ernst Jünger, and was awarded the DAAD/GSA Article Prize in 2007 for an essay on R. M. Rilke published in the German Studies Review.