Faculty > Ian Wilson
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Ian W. Wilson office: 461 Crounse Academic Center |
I joined the Centre College faculty in the fall of 2003 as a visiting instructor of German and humanities. I teach all levels of German at Centre, and I also teach in the Humanities sequence. I am currently serving as chair of the German Studies program. This fall I'll be teaching German 110, German 210 and German 350: German Cultural Geography. In the spring, I'll be teaching German 120, 220, and 340: Vaterland und Muttersprache. I've just returned from a year directing and teaching in the Centre-in-Strasbourg program. I loved the experience and cannot wait to do it again. I am, however, also very excited to get back into full-time German teaching back on Centre's Danville campus. During CentreTerm 2008, I led a group of 25 students on a trip to Berlin, Prague, and Vienna. The course, "Introduction to the Cultural History of Central Europe," emphasized the modern history of the area, focusing especially on the German and Habsburg empires and on Jewish life in Central Europe. I hope to guide a similar trip soon, hopefully specifically for German students. I started learning German during the summer of 1988, which I spent with the family of a German friend in the south of France, on a bike tour through "West Germany"--but including a visit to both sides of the divided city of Berlin--and in the northern German city of Bremen. After high school I continued my study of German at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where I earned a B.A. in comparative literature and German. I then continued my study of German while pursuing advanced degrees in comparative literature from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. At UNC-CH I taught courses in German (including Composition and Conversation) , comparative literature, and German-language sections of courses in history and international studies. I was also a graduate teaching consultant at UNC-CH's Center for Teaching and Learning. While at UNC-CH, I spent a summer in Regensburg and a year in Vienna. I returned to Vienna in the summers of 2004 and 2007 to conduct research at the Dokumentationsstelle für neuere österreichische Literatur at the Literaturhaus Wien thanks to grants from Centre. I spent part of the summer of 2005 in Berlin and Poland researching cultural responses to the Holocaust. I am especially interested in the culture of Austria and in the various component cultures that made up the former Austro-Hungarian empire, such as those of the Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovakia, Poland, Slovenia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia. My research focuses on the works of Austrian author Elfriede Jelinek, a difficult figure whose equally difficult novels and plays evoke strong reactions. I"m especially interested in ways her works convey what I call "illegibility"--their inability to be easily, completely, or even sufficiently understood while remaining encouraging of their own deciphering. I'm working on a book on this theme and her novels, plays, and essays right now. Other scholarly interests include critical theory, cultural representations of the extreme (e.g., the sublime, the traumatic, the impossible), G. E. Lessing, and intersections between literature and other arts, especially photography and film. (I regularly include films in my courses, and I have organized campus International Film Festivals since the spring of 2005.) I published an article on Samuel Beckett's bilingual literary production and was a contributor to An Encyclopedia of African American Literature, published in September 2005. Some of my most recent work, on Elfriede Jelinek's novel Die Kinder der Toten, appeared in the fall of 2006 in the journal Modern Austrian Literature. I've also organized a panel at the German Studies Association annual conference that investigated transnational identity as presented in Turkish-German Fatih Akin's films. For the summer of 1997 I received a DAAD grant to study German language and culture at the Universität Regensburg. In 2000-01 I was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship to conduct research at the Internationales Forschungszentrum Kulturwissenschaften in Vienna. I received the Centre College "Rookie of the Year" award from Omicron Delta Kappa in 2004, and I received Centre's Kirk Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2005. During the summer of 2005, I was a Fellow at the annual Summer Institute on the Holocaust and Jewish Civilization at Northwestern University. Faculty Development Grants from Centre have enabled me to return recently to Vienna twice (2004, 2007), to Berlin (2005), and to further Holocaust sites in Poland (2005) and Germany and Austria (2009). In May 2009, I was named a Centre Scholar for 2009-11. Relevant links: revised 3 August 07
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