Works in Progress
Articles
Plots and Counterplots: The leserfeindliche Semiotics of Hermann Broch's Der Tod des Vergil.
A continuation of "Die Rezeptionsästhetik der Resignation" (to be published in 2020), investigating how Broch's text contravenes narrative satisfaction through its unique semiotic contortions.
Target Submission Date: Late 2019
The Hellish Labyrinth of the Intertext: Aeneas, Dante, Virgil, and Orpheus and Hermann Broch's Der Tod des Vergil.
An investigation into how Broch conflates various other "infernal" plots within his own novel.
Target Submission Date: Late 2019
Hermann Broch, Avant-Garde Ambivalence, and the Anxiety of Influence.
A Reader-Response inquiry into Broch's simultaneous ambivalence toward and desire to distinguish his aesthetic production during his "negative aesthetics" period.
Target Submission Date: 2020
The Speculative Turn: Hermann Broch's Der Tod des Vergil as Existential Inquiry.
An examination of how Hermann Broch's novel Der Tod des Vergil (1945) adapts the inner monologue technique from a psychological examination of experience into a speculative inquiry into the meaning of being.
Target Submission Date: 2020
The Diversity of Queerness, 1918-1939
Expanding on recent discussions on conservative expressions of homosexuality (e.g. Max Kramer, "From Georg Simmel to Stefan George: Sexology, Male Bonding, and Homosexuality," German Studies Review 41, no. 2 (2018): 275-296), this project will discuss other forms of Queerness and LGBTQ during the interbellum period, particularly conservative, misogynistic, and homophobic forms. As a beginning point, this project will begin with a reading of Trommlerbub' unterm Hakenkreuz, a National Socialist propaganda novel aimed at young adults and which strongly interrelates male-bonding, chauvinism, and homoeroticism in its appeal to young males.
Target Publication Date: To Be Determined
Conference Presentations
Academic Honesty After Artificial Intelligence
This presentation aims to inform teachers of nascent forms of academic dishonesty and suggest proactive strategies for preventing them. New developments in artificial intelligence, augmented reality, and mobile computing have made possible language tools and apps that present new challenges to foreign language instruction. The convenience and enhanced accuracy of deep-learning online translators, automated proofreaders, and real-time electronic interpreters make their abuse more appealing to language learners and more difficult to detect for language instructors. Traditional plagiarism countermeasures that rely on forewarning and enforcing negative sanctions have difficulty in dissuading these practices.
To combat the abuse of these technologies, this presentation lays out strategies that aim to proactively prevent bad practices without significantly constraining the availability of technology in the classroom or compromising known best practices. In particular, this presentation presents three main avenues of action: Firstly, it encourages instructors to create a classroom culture of accountability. By using various “soft power” methods, teachers can facilitate a sense of mutual obligation from students to their peers as well as the instructor themselves, adding a “human face” and emotional consequences to the vice. Secondly, it promotes tactics that preempt student attitudes and habits that can lead to dishonesty. Instructors can mitigate feelings of frustration and desperation before they lead to plagiarism by cultivating support structures, such as study groups, accessible feedback, and supplementary materials, and by proactively intervening with at-risk students. Finally, this article proposes methods that adjust student perceptions in favor of honest practices. Through careful instructional design, instructors can have students implicitly change their mental calculus toward plagiarism by making honest methods easier, more advantageous to the student’s short and long-term goals, and more enjoyable than dishonest methods.
Presentation Date: 2019 ACTFL Conference
Digital Humanities Projects
Completed: Antiqua Conversion, Annotation, and Abridgement of Wilfrid Bade's Trommlerbub unterm Hakenkreuz.
Conversion of a Nazi young adult propaganda novel to a more "student-friendly" form from the original Fraktur.
Standardized Digitization of Hermann Broch's Der Tod des Vergil.
GitHub Project Site
Synopsis: A conversion of the plain text digitization of Broch's text into the TEI markup language to allow better parsing and standards compliance.
Expected Completion Date: Undetermined