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Susan Babilon
Adjunct Assistant Professor of German
Olin Hall 335
(509) 527-4600
babilos@whitman.edu
Susan Babilon received her Ph.D. from The City University of New York in 1999. She also studied at the Ludwig Maximillians Universität in Munich while on a DAAD research and study grant during the 1996-1997 year. Her dissertation is a study of the development of the sound poetry of Hugo Ball, especially of the influences by the Russian abstract painter Wassily Kandinsky, the Italian Futurist Filippo Marinetti and the Russian Zaum poets Alexei Kruchenyek and Velimir Khlebnikov. Her academic interests are second-language acquisition as well as literature of the 20th and late 19th centuries. She is particularly interested in convergences of literature and the visual arts. She has taught courses on Dada, German literature, and also regularly teaches 1st- and 3rd-year German. Read more...

Amy Blau
Visiting Assistant Professor of German
Professor Amy Blau studied comparative literature as an undergraduate at Haverford College, and as a graduate student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she received her MA and Ph.D. She has spent time in Germany as a student at the Universität Regensburg and at the Simon Dubnow Institute for Jewish History and Culture at the Universität Leipzig, and as a Fulbright Teaching Assistant in Stralsund, Germany (1996-97). Her dissertation investigates translations of German literature into Yiddish; a Center for Jewish History fellowship allowed Blau to complete her dissertation research at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research and the Leo Baeck Institute in New York City in 2004-5. In 2005-6, she continued her research on Yiddish translations of German literature as a Golda Meir Postdoctoral Fellow at the Yiddish department of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. At Whitman, she will be teaching German language, German literature, and German-Jewish Studies, as well as contributing to the General Studies program.

Robert Bode
Professor of Music
Hall of Music 115
boderh@whitman.edu
Professor Robert Bode received his doctorate in Choral Conducting from the Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music in Cincinnati, Ohio. Prior to attending the Cincinnati Conservatory, Dr. Bode won a conducting scholarship to the prestigious Aspen Music Festival, where he studied Opera Conducting with Fiora Contino. Read more...

Dennis Crockett
Professor of Art History and Visual Culture Studies
Olin Hall 182
crockedc@whitman.edu
Professor Crockett teaches courses on European visual culture since the Late Middle Ages. He has published on German modernism, including: German Post-Expressionism: The Art of the Great Disorder 1918-1924 (Penn State Press, 1999). He received his Ph.D. from the City University of New York in 1993, MA from Queens College in 1985, and BA from University of South Florida in 1983.

Thomas Davis
Associate Professor of Philosophy
Olin Hall 150
davista@whitman.edu

Patrick Frierson
Assitant Professor of Philosophy
Olin Hall
frierspr@whitman.edu
Professor Patrick Frierson is an Assistant Professor in Philosophy, specializing in (among other things) 18th and 19th century German philosophy. He did his undergraduate studies in philosophy and physics at Williams College, where he foolishly took a mere three semesters of German. In graduate school in philosophy at the University of Notre Dame, he realized the error of his ways and made up some ground by going to a Goethe Institute in Schwäbish Gmünd and then taking an independent study reading several writings of Gottlob Fichte in German. In the end, he managed to scrape through, writing a dissertation on Friedrich Schleiermacher's critique of Immanuel Kant's anthropology that made extensive use of the then recently published (in German) Kants Vorlesungen über Anthropologie. More recently, Prof. Frierson has received two Perry grants to work with German majors translating Kant's Bemerkungen zu den Beobachtungen über das Gefühl des Schönen und Erhabenen. In addition to this translation project, Prof. Frierson is currently working on several articles and a book on Kant. For recent publications and current work in progress, see his web page (people.whitman.edu/~frierspr). Courses of interest to German majors include "Kant and the 19th Century" (Phil 304), "Kant's Moral Philosophy," "Kant's Critique of Pure Reason." and "Hegel's Moral and Political Philosophy." More information about Professor Frierson is available on his personal Web site.

Karl Storchman
Associate Professor of Economics
Karl Storchman is Associate Professor of Economics. He received his PhD from the University of Bochum in 1998 and his Habilitation from the same university in 2005. Before coming to Whitman, he taught at Yale University for four years and also lectured at the University of Jena. He has just founded the Journal of Wine Economics. While at Whitman, he has had two Abshire Awards to work on the economics of wine in Germany with Ben Keefer. Check out Karl's Web page.

Lynn Sharp
Associate Professor of History
Maxey Hall 220
sharpll@whitman.edu
Professor Sharp recieved her Ph.D. from the University of California, Irvine in 1996. Her courses cover Modern Europe, including France, Germany, and Russia. She is currently researching reincarnation and spiritualism in 19th-century France. Her other interests include socialism, religion, gender and women's history and a special fascination with the fin-de-siêcle.

Walt Wyman
Professor of Religion
Olin Hall 148
wyman@whitman.edu
Professor Wyman's work in the Academic Study of Religion centers on Christian Theology; he is especially interested in German Protestant theology in the 19th and 20th centuries. Wyman has written on Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834), Adolf von Harnack (1850-1930), and Ernst Troeltsch (1865-1923). He does most of my research in German language materials, and attends conferences in Germany whenever he is able. Read more...

Julia Burg is this year's Native Speaker, living in the German House and assisting in the German Department.  Julia is majoring in English and Spanish Literature & Linguistics at the Albert-Ludwigs-University in Freiburg.  She's taught German at a vocational school in Germany, spent 6 months living in Chicago as an au-pair, and in the spring of 2008 studied in Seville, Spain.