Nachwuchsforum der Gesellschaft für Kanada-Studien e.V.

Melanie Braith is a PhD student at the Department of English, Film, and Theatre at the University of Manitoba. She is originally from Germany and holds a bachelor's and a master's degree in English Literatures and Cultures from the University of Konstanz. Prior to her studies, she worked for several years as a newspaper editor and a journalist for print, TV, and online media. As a PhD student, Melanie works on Indigenous literatures in general and residential school literature in particular. She is also fortunate to work at the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation where she is busy creating an oral history of Canada's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). Melanie’s research interests include Indigenous and Canadian literatures as well as theories of trauma, memory, identity, and community in literary and various cultural contexts.

After graduating with a BA from the University of Lausanne in English and history including an exchange year at the University of Glasgow, Cécile pursued a Master’s degree in English in Lausanne with an exchange semester at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. She finished her MA with a thesis on four Canadian indigenous plays by Marie Clements, Monique Mojica and Tomson Highway in 2012. The following year, she left for two years to study further and teach World Civilizations and English Composition at the State University of New York at Buffalo in the United States. Since coming back to Lausanne in 2015, she has taught English Composition, Introduction to Literary Analysis and Introduction to Gender Studies while researching her PhD project, which analyzes the cultural negotiation of justice and the law in Native American crime fiction with a special focus on gendered violence. She therefore finds interdisciplinary research most enriching, which is why her interests extend from Native studies, feminist studies, cultural studies as well as gothic and crime fiction studies to political philosophy, postcolonial theory as well as law and literature.

Sabin Jeanmaire holds both a BA (2010) and an M.A. (2013) degree in English Literature and Linguistics, as well as Spanish Literature and Linguistics, from the University of Zurich. She completed parts of her BA studies at the University of Valencia, Spain, and parts of her MA studies at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. Her research interests include metafiction, adaptation, and psychoanalytic criticism. She wrote her MA thesis on metafictional elements in Ian McEwan’s Atonement, and is now working on her doctoral thesis on the Canadian author Timothy Findley, focusing on the topics of trauma and witnessing in his oeuvre.

Alicia Krömer is from London, Canada. She has completed a Bachelors in English Literature at the University of British Columbia in 2007 and graduated in 2010 with a Masters in European Studies from the University of Graz in cooperation with the University of Barcelona and the European Research Institute in Bolzano, Italy. Her Masters’ thesis was a comparative analysis between the rights of Sami in Scandinavia and First Nations in Canada. In 2016, she completed her doctoral thesis “Social influence and impact on the collective memory of the Native Residential schools in Canada (1867-1996)” at the department of political science at the University of Vienna, while teaching and working at the United Nations in Vienna. She currently teaches in Bern and Zurich in Switzerland while pursuing a postdoctoral project which explores the comparative rights of Indigenous cultures around the world.

Patrizia Zanella is a Swiss National Science Foundation PhD candidate at the University of Fribourg. Her doctoral project investigates literal and metaphorical border-crossings in the fiction of Louise Erdrich, James Welch, Thomas King, and Tomson Highway. She is interested in working in a comparative Native North American framework combining Indigenous, American, Canadian, and border studies. As part of her SNSF scholarship, she spent eight months at the American Indian Studies Department at the University of Minnesota-Duluth and will spend the 2017 fall semester at the First Nations Studies Department at Simon Fraser University. ​

Orla Siobhán Flock studied English and Political Science at the University of Konstanz and is now a PhD student at the Department of Literature at the University of Konstanz. Her dissertation is entitled “The Dual Artist Novel: Surpassing Genre and Gender” and focuses on a new sub-type of the Artist Novel genre. Further research interests include the representation of the aesthetic, gender studies, queer theory, feminist theory and genre theory.

Bianka Gengler holds a B.A. in British and American Studies and Sociology as well as an M.A. in British and American Studies from the University of Konstanz. She is now a PhD student at the Department of Literature at the University of Konstanz, writing her dissertation about the interrelation of the national myth of the American Dream and the contemporary fiction of Los Angeles. Her research interests include urban fiction including crime and minority narratives as well as comparative North American Studies and national mythologies. Bianka has recently concluded a research year at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada while holding a scholarship by the Baden-Württemberg Foundation

Ingrid Kaplitz is a PhD student at the Department of Literature at the University of Konstanz. Her dissertation project examines the use of food as a marker of cultural identity and social class in contemporary African and Asian North American literature. She holds an M.A. in British and American Studies and a B.A. in British and American Studies and Political Science from the University of Konstanz. Her research interests include comparative North American literature, literary food studies, and multiculturalism in Canada and the US.

Bettina Mack, M.A. earned her BA (British and American Studies & Political Science) from the University of Tübingen and MA from the University of Konstanz, Germany (British and American Studies), having spent one year each at universities in the United States and Canada. In Konstanz, she is now a PhD student of American and Canadian literature, writing about historiographic metafiction in North America. The project is informed by her recent research interests in transnational and comparative approaches to the literatures of Canada and the United States, especially contemporary historical fiction. In the past, she taught a seminar on “Canadian Historiographic Metafiction” in Konstanz, and currently works as a teaching assistant and research assistant in the department of North American Studies.

Eva Mendez read British and American Studies and Gender Studies at the University of Konstanz from 2008 to 2012. Returning to Konstanz after completing an MA in Creative and Critical Writing at the University of Sussex in 2013, she fell in love with the works of Alice Munro during a graduate seminar. Since then, Eva has been working on her PhD project entitled “Prerequisites for Women’s Writing in the Writer Narratives of Virginia Woolf and Alice Munro.” Further research interests include the Gothic, especially the figure of the vampire, queer theory, and fictionality in scientific texts. Eva holds a PhD scholarship from the Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes and has just returned from her research year as a recognized student at the University of Oxford.

Jana Nürnberger est doctorante à l’Université de Ratisbonne, Allemagne. Dans le cadre de sa thèse de doctorat portant sur le fugitif dans la poésie francophone actuelle, elle analyse les œuvres de Claude Beausoleil (Montréal), Louis-Philippe Dalembert (Port-au-Prince, Paris) et Patrick Bouvet (Paris). Un séjour de recherche à l’Université de Montréal, soutenu entre autres par la Stiftung für Kanada-Studien, l’emmène à Montréal pendant le trimestre d’été 2016. En 2012, elle finit ses études de littératures, cultures et langues romanes à l’Université de Bamberg. De 2008 à 2009, elle étudia en tant que boursière du DAAD les relations culturelles entre la France et l’Allemagne à l’Université Paris 3- Sorbonne nouvelle. Après ses études, elle travailla d’abord dans le programme culturel et de cours de langues à l’Institut franco-allemand à Erlangen, ou elle fut responsable des projets de théâtre trinationaux. De septembre 2014 à janvier 2016, elle fut assistante scientifique à l’Université de Ratisbonne.

Rene Reichert, M.A. studied British and American as well as Spanish Studies at the University of Konstanz. He has conducted research abroad at the University of British Columbia and Yale. He has just returned from the latter where he also worked as a language instructor at the German Department during fall and spring term 2015/16. In Konstanz, he currently is a research assistant and PhD candidate specializing in comparative North American literature. His dissertation looks at fiction about the Canada-US border. The project research is heavily influenced by his interest for ethnic and minority writing. During the coming winter semester, he will teach a seminar on ‘Vietnam Draft Dodgers and the Canada-US Border’.

Alena Schmidt-Weihrich is a PhD student at the faculty for American Studies in Konstanz. She studied at the University of Konstanz and the University of British Columbia (exchange) and received her MA in British and American Studies in 2014. Since then, Alena has been working on her dissertation project tentatively titled “Idealizing and Realizing North America: The Interrelations of National Myths, National Identity, and Multiculturalism in the United States and Canada”. Other fields of interest are Comparative North American literature, Alice Munro, and North American short fiction. Alena holds a scholarship for doctoral study awarded according to the LGFG.