Network Members

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Childs Matthew (Ph.D. University of Washington)
Matthew Childs is currently a visiting assistant professor in the Department of German and Russian at Wake Forest University (USA). Matthew is interested in how catastrophe undergoes shifts and constancies in its representation and conceptual understanding, and how this affects the social and political imaginary. His current book project, Catastrophe and Critique: A Dialectic of German Modernity, centers on the development of the catastrophe concept from the 1755 Lisbon Earthquake to World War II.
Matthew is a co-editor and contributor to the volume-in-progress Critical Catastrophe Studies, which tracks the interrelation and evolution of catastrophe and critique from Ancient Greece to the present-day. He is the author of “The Value of Literature: The Discard of Society in Wilhelm Raabe’s Pfisters Mühle: Ein Sommerferienheft” (On_Culture).
Link: https://germanrussian.wfu.edu/staff-member/matthew-childs/
Mail: matthew.robert.childs@gmail.com 

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Hofert Sandra
Sandra Hofert studied Cultural Studies and German Literature in Berlin, completing her PhD in Mainz. Her doctoral thesis was published in 2021 under the title “Didaxe und Natur”. Since 2020, she is a research assistant in German Medieval Studies at Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg. Her main research interests include the medieval conceptualisation of nature, ecocriticism and animal studies. Relevant publications are f. e. “Die Poetiken des Seesturms” (published 2024 in BME 17), “Animals and Emotions in Medieval German Literature” (published 2023 in Aestimatio 3.2), “Vom Schweigen der Vögel in Soltâne. Naturästhetik und das Experiment eines Ecocritical Close Readings von Wolframs ‘Parzival’ (mit einem Ausblick auf ‘Iwein’ und ‘Tristan’)“ (published 2025 in Archiv 262.2).
Link: https://www.germanistik.phil.fau.de/person/hofert-sandra/
Mail: sandra.hofert@fau.de

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Kupczynska Kalina
Kalina Kupczynska is Assistant professor at the Institute of German Studies at the University of Lodz (Poland). Scholarship holder of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the ÖAD, the DAAD and the Polish National Centre of Science (NCN). Publications on the German-language avant-garde, on contemporary Austrian literature, on comic adaptations of literary texts, on gender aspects in comics, on history comics and on comic autobiographies.
Recent publications:
– Edited volumes: 2024 Comics und Intersektionalität. Hg. v. Anna Beckmann/Kalina Kupczynska/Marie Schröer/Veronique Sina. Berlin: de Gruyter; 2024 Primus-Heinz Kucher/Kalina Kupczyńska/Artur Pelka (Hg.): Krisen(-Reflexionen). Literatur- und kulturwissenschaftliche Bestandsaufnahmen. V & R unipress; 2024 Gudrun Heidemann/Kalina Kupczyńska/Marina Rauchenbacher (Hg.): Offengelegte „Dämmerkonflikte“. Zum gesellschaftspolitischen Sensorium von Olga Flors Literatur. Wien: Sonderzahl 2024; 2023 Familie und Comic. Kritische Perspektiven auf soziale Mikrostrukturen in grafischen Narrationen. Hg. v. Barbara M. Eggert/Kalina Kupczyńska/Véronique Sina. Berlin: de Gruyter.
– Articles: 2025 Wie riecht Herkunft? Herkunftshader, Class, Gender und Smell bei Helena Adler und Angela Lehner. In: Literatur und Ideologie. Hg. v. Aleksej Burov, Maria Endreva und Jelena Spreicer. Wien: Praesens 2025, S. 165-181; 2025 Gezeichnete Lebenswelten – Victoria Lomaskos grafische Erkundung postsowjetischer Räume. In: Spuren der Wende in Mittel- und Osteuropa: Geisteswissenschaften und postsowjetische Welten. Hg. v. Paola di Mauro/Vahidin Preljevic, Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, S. 65-82.
Link: https://www.uni.lodz.pl/en/employee/kalina-kupczynska
Mail: kalina.kupczynska@uni.lodz.pl

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Ognjanović Branka
Branka Ognjanović is currently an assistant professor of German at the Faculty of Foreign Languages, Belgrade Metropolitan University (Serbia). She holds a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in German Studies from the Faculty of Philology and Arts, University of Kragujevac, where she also completed a PhD in Literary Studies. Her doctoral thesis examined the science fiction novels of Alfred Döblin and Dietmar Dath through the lens of posthuman ecocriticism. Relevant research interests: ecocritical readings of contemporary German literature; ecocritical approaches to children’s and young adult literature from a comparative perspective; and ecocritical pedagogy in the national/foreign language and literature education.
Link: https://www.metropolitan.ac.rs/profesori/branka-ognjanovic
Mail: branka.ognjanovic@metropolitan.ac.rs

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Sabban Adela Sophia
Adela Sophia Sabban is currently a research and teaching assistant in the Department of GermanStudies at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland. She studied German language and literature, art history,musicology, and philosophy in Munich and Padua. Her research focuses on poetry, particularly from the20th and 21st centuries, literature after 1945, and the relationship between text and image. Upcomingpublications as editor: A journal volume on “Natur und Religion im Werk Christian Lehnerts” and a volumeon “Natur in der neueren Lyrik – komparatistische Zugänge”.
Link: https://adelasabban.wordpress.com/literaturwissenschaft/
Mail: adela.sabban@unifr.ch

Sternath Vanessa-Nadine
Vanessa-Nadine Sternath is a research assistant in the Department of Medieval German Studies at the University of Kassel. She is a member of the interdisciplinary working group Climate Thinking, a teaching and research focus at the University of Kassel that addresses the topics of climate change, the environment and sustainability. Sternath is co-editor of the Climates – Cultures – Contexts series at transcript, which examines how climate is discussed, narrated and reflected upon from a humanities and cultural studies perspective. She researches and teaches intersectional approaches, plant studies, ecocriticism and ecofeminism, and digital humanities. In addition to translations, adaptations and reworkings of Latin texts into Middle High German, she is interested in text-image relations in medieval manuscripts and incunabula.
Link: https://www.uni-kassel.de/fb02/institute/germanistik/fachgebiete/aeltere-deutsche-literaturwissenschaft-mediaevistik/mag-vanessa-nadine-sternath-ma.html
Mail: vanessa.sternath@uni-kassel.de

Sullivan Heather I.
Heather I. Sullivan is Professor of German and Comparative Literature at Trinity University in Texas, USA. She has published widely in North America and Europe on ecocriticism and the Anthropocene, Goethe, German Romanticism, petro-texts, the “dark green,” fairy tales, and critical plant studies, and is currently working on a manuscript “The Dark Green: Plants, People, Power.” Sullivan is co-editor of German Ecocriticism in the Anthropocene (2017); of The Early History of Embodied Cognition, 1746-1920 (2016); of numerous special volumes on ecocriticism; and the author of Intercontextuality of Self and Nature in Ludwig Tieck’s Early Works. She is past President of the North American Goethe Society, Associate Editor of the European Ecocriticism Journal Ecozon@, and Co-editor of the De Gruyter series, “Ecocriticism Unbound.”
Link: https://www.trinity.edu/directory/hsulliva
Mail: hsulliva@trinity.edu

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