Professional Activities

Although I seem to be spending more and more time working in the areas of second language acquisition and instructional technologies, my research interests still center on the eighteenth century, specifically the representation of power and authority in Weimar Classicism. In the past, the Goethe Society of North America (GSNA) has given me the opportunity to organize and chair a number of its panels at professional meetings. Since December 2001 I have been serving on the board of the Goethe Society as webmaster and editor of its newsletter.
  

In 1997 I coorganized an international conference here on campus, entitled Approaches to Weimar: The Second Davidson German Studies Symposium. The volume that grew out of that conference is entitled Unwrapping Goethe's Weimar. Essays on Cultural Studies and Local Knowledge (eds. Burkhard Henke, Susanne Kord, and Simon Richter) and appeared with Camden House in 2000. I am currently working on a revised and expanded version of my dissertation, Schillers Tragödie des Usurpators. "Auf ein Wort: was fällt Ihnen zu Goethe ein?" -- "Schiller."
    

Since coming to Davidson, I have served a three-year term as Representative in the Delegate Assembly of the Modern Language Association and been an active member of the NCAATG, the North Carolina chapter of the American Association of Teachers of German. After serving on the executive council as testing chair and webmaster for several years, I was elected Vice President in 2005 and served as President from 2007 to 2009.

  
To help strengthen articulation between secondary and post-secondary education here on campus, I founded the German Summer Institute, an annual opportunity for high school teachers of German to earn continuing education credits. At Davidson I have also sat on numerous committees and served as language coordinator and supervisor of teaching assistants for German. I have been chairing the department since 2002.