Faculty and Staff

For general questions about the German program, please contact german@kzoo.edu or Dr. Kathryn Sederberg, Chair of German Studies.

Michael Powers

Assistant Professor of German Studies

Ph.D., Brown University
M.A., Brown University
B.A. New College of Florida

Prof. Powers specializes in eighteenth- to twentieth-century German literature and philosophy, with emphases in critical theory, media studies, and the environmental humanities. He has published on topics ranging from Goethe’s scientific studies of perception and color, Hermynia Zur Mühlen’s socialist fairy tales and anthropocentrism, to the competing notions of “free play” in the pedagogical, psychoanalytic, and political writings of Jean Paul, Freud, and Walter Benjamin. At Kalamazoo, he enjoys teaching courses that enable students to explore different areas of German-speaking culture and thought, from art, literature, and film, to philosophy, political theory, and environmental studies.

Email:

Michael.Powers@kzoo.edu

Office:

Dewing 212E

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Kathryn Sederberg

Lucinda Hinsdale Stone Associate Professor of German Studies
Chair, German Studies Department

Ph.D., University of Michigan 
B.A., St. Olaf College

Prof. Sederberg’s main research areas include twentieth-century German literature and culture, autobiographical writing, war and gender, and National Socialism and its legacies. She is also active in the field of language pedagogy and has published on content-based language instruction, teaching with museums, and curriculum development with a literacies approach. For excellence in teaching German, she was the recipient of a 2022 Certificate of Merit from the Goethe-Institut and the American Association of Teachers of German.

She is currently working on a book project about the diaries written by German and Austrian Jewish refugees fleeing Nazism in the 1930s and 40s. Her research has been supported by the Botstiber Institute for Austrian-American Studies, the Center for Holocaust Studies at the Leibniz Institute for Contemporary History in Munich, the Research Centre for German & Austrian Exile Studies at the Institute of Languages, Cultures and Societies, University of London, and the American Philosophical Society. In summer 2024 she was the Kurt and Thea Sonnenmark Memorial Visiting Fellow at the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Email:

kathryn.sederberg@kzoo.edu

Office:

Dewing 212G

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Emily Fink-Craig

Office Coordinator, Languages

Phone:

269.337.7136

Email:

Emily.Fink-Craig@kzoo.edu

Office:

Dewing

Emeriti Faculty

Hardy O. Fuchs

Hardy Fuchs

Professor of German, Emeritus; B.A. Kalamazoo College, University of Bonn; M.A. Indiana University; Ph.D. Michigan State University

Joe K. Fugate

Joe Fugate

Professor of German and Director of Foreign Study, Emeritus; B.A. Southern Illinois University; M.A., Ph.D. Princeton University

Margo R. Light

Margo Light

Professor of German, Emerita; B.A. Hope College; M.A. Indiana University; Ph.D. University of Michigan


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