Professor of German and Director,
Center for Interdisciplinary Studies

A.B. (University of Chicago)
A.M., Ph.D. (Harvard University)
Curriculum vitae
  
Contact

Carolina Inn 100
Davidson College
USPS: Box 6932, Davidson, NC 28035-6932
FedEx, UPS, etc.: 209 Ridge Road, Davidson, NC 28036
Phone: 704-894-2855; Fax: 704-894-2720
scdenham@davidson.edu

Current Office Hours and Schedule

Current Courses

I studied at the University of Chicago (BA, honors in German), the Philipps-Universität Marburg, the Freie Universität Berlin, and Harvard University (PhD 1990), working there primarily in German, but also in comparative literature and history. I have written and spoken on war fiction, Ernst Jünger, Kafka, reception studies, interdisciplinarity and cultural studies, Modernism and narrative, the Holocaust, Walter Gropius and the Bauhaus, and W.G. Sebald. I co-edit the series Interdisciplinary German Cultural Studies (de Gruyter). My teaching interests include German studies broadly, modernism and narrative theory, the Holocaust and its representation, second-language and writing pedagogy, Susan Sontag, Günter Grass, Christa Wolf, postwar German film, German politics and culture, and questions of identity, loss, and memory in the central European context. I have recently also worked on war stories by Jens Rehn and Hans Erich Nossack. I also teach in Davidson's Humanities courses. I enjoy working with students in independent studies and small-group tutorials and I also advise departmental senior theses. I am continuing work on Sebald, on Ernst Jünger's nationalist essays from the 1920s, on an essay on Friedrich Torberg's politics of emigration, and I have a new book project on ideas and representations of German suffering. An even longer-term book project on Walter Gropius, the Bauhaus, and Modernism lays claim to much space on my bookshelves and in my files.

I received Davidson's Hunter-Hamilton Love of Teaching Award in 2002 and have been the recipient of many grants and fellowships as well. I take an active interest in matters of student life at Davidson. I have directed the department's study abroad program in Würzburg three times (1992-93, 1996-97, 2003-2004). As Director of the Center for Interdisciplinary Studies at Davidson I work closely with students practicing interdisciplinary research. I also currently chair the College's Graduate Fellowships Committee.

Beyond the classroom and the library I spend time in the fields and woods in Ost-Westfalen, North Carolina and Colorado, on the water hoping for wind, and with my wife Cathy (a teacher), and daughters Evelyn and Beatrice (and the dogs).