Associate Professor, Chair

Chinese, German, Italian, Japanese, and Russian Studies

Curriculum Vitae

Christiane Steckenbiller joined Colorado College in 2014. Her research focuses on twentieth- and twenty-first-century German literature-with an emphasis on Turkish German studies, transnational literature, and migration and minority discourses-postcolonial studies, and cultural geography. Her scholarship is situated at the intersections of migration, spatiality, and identity, and explores the ways in which migrants, and more recently refugees, assert claims over space and attach meaning and symbolism to their environment. Dr. Steckenbiller's interest in transnationalism and migration also extends beyond the German context as she considers the concept of diaspora more broadly and examines different diasporas in different contexts in her first book project, tentatively titled Putting Place Back into Displacement: Reevaluating Diaspora in the Contemporary Literature of Migration. She has turned toward the implications of forced migration for the European context, and the hybrid and transitory space of the Mediterranean in her more recent work.

Dr. Steckenbiller teaches German literature, culture, and language at all levels. She has taught courses cross-listed with Comparative Literature, Race, Ethnicity, and Migration Studies, Film and Media Studies, and the Environmental Studies Program. She regularly teaches in Germany for the German Fall Semester. In addition to getting students excited about the German language and culture, and studying abroad, in her free time she enjoys the Colorado outdoors and has recently taken up studying Modern Greek.

Publications

"German literary responses to the 'migrant crisis:' Space and the colonial past in Jenny Erpenbeck's Gehen, ging, gegangen (2015) and Bodo Kirchhoff's Widerfahrnis (2016)," forthcoming. Refugee Routes: Telling, Looking, Protesting, Redressing, edited by Vanessa Agnew, Kader Konuk, and Jane E. Newman, Transcript [projected publication date August, 2020].

"Berlin's Colonial Legacies and New Minority Histories."Monatshefte für deutschsprachige Kultur und Literatur,Vol. 111, no.1, 2019. pp. 99-116.

"Futurity, Aging, and Personal Crises: Writing About Refugees in Jenny Erpenbeck's Gehen, ging, gegangen(2015) and Bodo Kirchhoff's Widerfahrnis(2016)." The German Quarterly, vol. 92, no. 1, 2019, pp. 68-86.

"Diasporic Ways of Knowing: Teju Cole's Open City." New Directions in Diaspora Studies, edited by Sarah Ilott, Ana Cristina Mendes, and Lucinda Newns, Rowman and Littlefield, 2018, pp. 71-85.

"Transnational Cityscapes: Tracking Turkish-German Hi/Stories in Postwar Berlin." Cultural Topographies of the New Berlin, edited by Karin Bauer and Jennifer Ruth Hosek, Berghahn Books, 2018, pp. 297-321.

"Toward a better understanding of culture: Wikis in the beginning German classroom," co-authored with Professor Lara Ducate. The Language Learning Journal, Vol. 45, no. 2, 2017, pp. 202-219.

"Am kürzeren Ende der Sonnenallee in 140 Characters or Less: Using Twitter as a Creative Approach to Literature in the Intermediate German Classroom," Die Unterrichtspraxis/Teaching German, Vol. 49, no. 2, 2016, pp. 147-160.

Regular Classes

Multiethnic Germany

Migrants, Minorities, Refugees

Love, Death & Other Demons: Turkish German Cinema

Green Germany

Berlin Stories: A Cultural History of Berlin

Italian and German Culture Through Film (co-taught with Dr. Amanda Minervini)