Dr. Nicole Thesz

EDUCATION HISTORY

• Ph.D., Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), May 2002. Dissertation: “Palimpseste zur Deutschen Einheit: Die Funktion der Prosa und Lyrik Theodor Fontanes in Günter Grass’ Ein weites Feld” (“Palimpsests on German Unification: The Function of Theodor Fontane’s Prose and Poetry in Günter Grass’s Too Far Afield.”)
• M.A., Program in Comparative Literature, May 1999

TEACHING AND RESEARCH INTERESTS

• German language and culture
• 19th, 20th, and 21st century literature
• The European fairy tale tradition
• The relationship between science & humanities
• The portrayal of medicine in literature
• GDR literature and film
• Ecocriticism

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS

• “From Jugendbewegung to RAF: Youth, Friendship, and Protest in Post-Wall German Cinema.” Studies in Twentieth & Twenty-First Century Literature 34.1 (2011).
• “Nature Romanticism and Grimms’ Tales: An Ecocritical Approach to Günter Grass’s The Flounder and The Rat.” Marvels & Tales: Journal of Fairy-Tale Studies 25.1 (2011).
• “Marie Nathusius’s Elisabeth and Theodor Fontane’s Effi Briest: Mental Illness and Marital Discord in the ‘Century of Nerves.’” The German Quarterly 83.1 (2010): 19-37.
• “Illusions of Return: City and Memory in Günter Grass’s Danzig Novels.” Seminar: A Journal of Germanic Studies 45.1 (2009): 64-84.
•  “‘Ostalgie’ and Adolescence in Jakob Hein’s Mein erstes T-Shirt, Wolfgang Becker’s Good Bye, Lenin!, and Leander Haußmann’s Sonnenallee.” Oxford German Studies 37.1 (2008): 107-23.
• “Dangerous Monuments: Günter Grass and German Memory Culture.” German Studies Review 31.1 (2008): 1-21.
• “‘Without Poachers, no Foresters, and Vice Versa’: Political Violence in Günter Grass’s Ein weites Feld.” The German Quarterly 80.1 (2007): 59-76.
• “Thomas Mann und die ‘Welt vor dem großen Kriege’: Abgrenzung und Dialektik auf dem Zauberberg” (“Thomas Mann and the ‘World before the Great War’: Demarcation and Dialectics on the Magic Mountain”). Monatshefte 98.3 (2006): 384-402.
• “Against a New Era in Vergangenheitsbewältigung: Continuities in Günter Grass’s Crabwalk.” Colloquia Germanica 37.3-4 (2004): 291-306.
• “Identität und Erinnerung im Umbruch: Ein weites Feld von Günter Grass” (“Identity and Memory in Upheaval: Günter Grass’s Too Far Afield”). Neophilologus 87.3 (2003): 435-51.
• “Farbenspiele: Der Symbolismus in Jüngers Auf den Marmorklippen” (“Playing with Colors: Symbolism in Jünger’s On Marble Cliffs”). Colloquia Germanica 34.2 (2001): 145-61.

WORKS OR PROJECTS IN PROGRESS

Articles

• “Spatial and Temporal Dislocation in Christa Wolf’s Stadt der Engel (2010): Encounter, Alterity, and Exile.”

Book

• "The Communicative Event in the Works of Günter Grass: Stages of Speech, 1959-2015."