Faculty

Below is a list of faculty that are active in the department, and available to students with course specific questions. If you need administrative support, we encourage you to refer your questions to one of the following;

  • The Chair of the department (see below) can address detailed program questions, including program requirements, planning and selection, research opportunities, graduate studies, and more.
  • The Academic Advisor, if available, can offer support including course registration and course load, important dates, academic policies and more.
  • The Academic Deans serve as the academic and administrative anchors to the professors within their Faculties or Schools as well as the students.

Faculty – German Studies:

Contact Information is found in the BU Directory
Dr. Sophie Boyer

Dr. Sophie Boyer

Full Professor – Department Chairperson

Sophie Boyer obtained her Ph.D. (2001) at McGill University with a dissertation on the representations of women in the love poetry of Heinrich Heine and Charles Baudelaire. During the course of her studies, she made extensive stays in southern Germany, Cologne and Bonn. She has been teaching German language and literature at Bishop’s since 1999. Her main interests are 19th century German and French literature and cultural history, literary theory, art history and film studies.

Dr. Boyer’s research explores the different meeting points of crime and sexuality in German literature from 1900 to 1933, a period in which crime literature depicting sexual violence flourished. Approximately twenty novels and short stories that push the boundaries of narration and representation will be analyzed. Rather than being a simple reflection of the society that produced them, these literary texts render a distorted image of this very society in which accounts of sexual assault, rape, and sexual murder figure as symptoms of a profound crisis, of a generalized psychopathology. Dr. Boyer’s research will attempt to elucidate how the same epoch could witness both the birth of psychoanalysis – a new science developed to explain and ultimately control the domain of sexuality – and the rise of a literary production in which sexuality has come to portray an uncontrollable threat. She will analyze to what extent the increase in “discourse on sex” (Foucault) provoked the emergence of such a crime literature, and to what extent this literature translates German society’s preoccupations. Moreover, Dr. Boyer intends to analyze the aesthetic aspects of the intersection of crime and sexuality. Whether inspired by real events or influenced by the narrative strategies of popular literature, the authors in question all cultivate an aesthetic of horror and anxiety that exerts an uncanny fascination over the reading public. It is one of the aims of this research project to reveal the complex mechanisms underlying this aesthetic of horror. Dr. Boyer’s project will contribute to the elucidation of a phenomenon that still haunts the field of literature today.

Book (monograph)

La femme chez Heinrich Heine et Charles Baudelaire: le langage moderne de l’amour. Paris: L’Harmattan, coll. “L’Allemagne d’hier et d’aujourd’hui”, 2005, 322 p.

Chapters in a Book

“Le roman familial des Jardin: pour une psychanalyse de l’écriture-miroir d’Alexandre Jardin.” Current Trends in Language and Culture Studies. Ed. M. Grieb et al. Boca Raton: Brown Walker Press, forthcoming.

“The Triumph of Hyperreality: A Baudrillardian Reading of Michael Haneke’s Cinematic Oeuvre.” Cinema and Social Change in Germany and Austria. Ed. G. Mueller and J. Skidmore. Waterloo: Wilfried Laurier University Press, 2012. 43-58.

Refereed Journal Articles

“‘Das Mark aus meinem Rückgrat trank/ Ihr Mund mit wildem Saugen’: le corps vampirique chez Heinrich Heine ou l’échange symbolique de l’amour et de la mort.” Amsterdamer Beiträge zur neueren Germanistik, “Body Dialectics in the Age of Goethe”. Ed. M. Henn and H. Pausch. Amsterdam: Rodopi, Band 55 (2003): 195-210.

Boyer, Sophie, and Dueck, Cheryl. “Ich habe mich immer zunächst dafür interessiert, eine gute Story zu finden…: Sophie Boyer und Cheryl Dueck im Gespräch mit Frank Beyer (11. November 2002).” Glossen 18 (2003): http://www.dickinson.edu/glossen

Published Conference Paper

“Temporality and Subversion in Marlen Haushoher’s The Wall.” Rethinking Violence and Patriarchy for the New Millennium: A German and Hispanic Perspective. Ed. F. de Diego and A. Schwartz. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 2002. 35-44.

Book Reviews and Entry in a Book

The Axe of Wandsbek, Falk Harnack, in: German Studies Review 33.2 (May 2010): 481-482.

“Böse Lust”: Gewaltverbrechen in Diskursen der Weimarer Republik, Hania Siebenpfeiffer, in: Seminar: A Journal of Germanic Studies 44.3 (September 2008): 389-390.

La séduction policière: signes de croissance d’un genre réputé mineur: Pierre Magnan, Daniel Pennac et quelques autres, Pierre Verdaguer, in: The Rocky Mountain Review of Language and Literature 61.1 (Spring 2007): 151-153.

Enlightenment Phantasies. Cultural Identity in France and Germany, 1750-1914, Harold Mah, in Seminar: A Journal of Germanic Studies 41.2 (May 2005): 170-171.

Heinrich Heine – Dichter, Philosoph und Europäer: Eine Studie zum weltanschaulich-philosophischen Strukturprinzip seiner Pariser Schriften, Erzsébet von Gaál Gyulai, in Seminar: A Journal of Germanic Studies 37.2 (May 2001): 176-177.

Entry on Sylvie Germain, in Who’s Who in Contemporary Women’s Writing. Ed. Jane Eldridge Miller. London, New York: Routledge, 2001. 119.

Recent Conference Papers

“Le roman familial des Jardin: pour une psychanalyse de l’écriture-miroir d’Alexandre Jardin.” XXth Southeast Conference in Foreign Languages, Literatures and Films, Stetson University, DeLand, Florida, 3 March, 2012.

“Patricide or Mourning for the Nation-State in Francis Leclerc’s Looking for Alexander.” States of Crime: The State in Crime Fiction, Fourth Interdisciplinary Conference of the Atlantic Alliance of Universities Crime Genre Research Group, Queen’s University, Belfast, Northern Ireland, 18 June 2011.

“Children of the Scorn: Witnessing Persecution in Michael Haneke’s Das weiβe Band.” Annual Meeting of the CAUTG, University of New Brunswick/St. Thomas University, Fredericton, 31 May 2011.

“Vive la différence!: Réflexions sur le monstre.ˮ ACFAS 79th Annual Congress, Colloquium “Identité et différence: réflexions interdisciplinaires,” Bishop’s University/Université de Sherbrooke, Sherbrooke, 12 May 2011.

“The Victim Turned Perpetrator: Monstrous Motherhood in Gertrud Kolmar’s Die jüdische Mutter [A Jewish Mother from Berlin].” International Journal of Arts & Sciences (IJAS) Mediterranean Conference for Academic Disciplines, University of Malta, Xewkija, Malta, 15 February 2010.

“Andrea Maria Schenkel’s Kalteis: A True Case Study of Literary Borrowing.’ Con(tra)vention: Crime and the Boundaries of Genre, Third Interdisciplinary Conference of the Atlantic Alliance of Universities Crime Genre Research Group, University College Cork, Cork, Ireland, 27 June 2009.

“Fictionalizing Pathology: Scientific Discourse & Ideology in Rahel Sanzara’s Das verlorene Kind.’ Northeast Modern Language Association Convention, Boston, Massachusetts, 28 February 2009.

“The Triumph of Hyperreality in Michael Haneke’s Cinematic Oeuvre”. Cinema and Social Change in Germany and Austria, University of Waterloo, May 1-3, 2008.

“The Political Power of Stone: Statues in Heinrich Heine’s Oeuvre.” Politics and Propaganda: 29th Annual Conference of the Nineteenth Century Studies Association, Florida International University, Miami, Florida, April 3-5, 2008.

“Transgressing the Law of the Father: Crime & Sexuality in Hermann Ungar’s Oeuvre.” 2008 National Popular Culture & American Culture Associations Conference, German Literature and Culture: “Kafka and his Friends” Panel, San Francisco, California, March 19-22, 2008.

“One Cannot Know the House in Which One Lives: Uncanny Setting in Hermann Ungar’s The Maimed.” The Scene of the Crime: Setting in Modern Crime Fiction, Second Interdisciplinary Conference of the Atlantic Alliance of Universities, University of Limerick, Ireland, 15-16 June 2007.

“The Aesthetics of Crime and Sexuality in Rahel Sanzara’s Das verlorene Kind.” Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association Convention, University of Arizona, Tucson, October 14, 2006.

“La mémoire du sang dans Das verlorene Kind von Rahel Sanzara.” ACFAS 74th Annual Congress, Colloquium “Mémoire et culture: nouvelles perspectives en études allemandes et germanophones”, McGill University, Montreal, May 16, 2006.

“Blame it on the Mother: Crime and Sexuality in Gertrud Kolmar’s Die jüdische Mutter.” Annual Meeting of the Canadian Association of University Teachers of German, University of Western Ontario, London, May 31, 2005.

“Kunst im DaF-Unterricht anhand von Käthe Kollwitz,” Canadian Association of Teachers of German/Association des professeurs d’allemand du Québec Annual Conference, Goethe-Institut, Montreal, February 7, 2004.

“Le discours de l’anti-séduction: pour une lecture baudrillardienne de Putain, de Nelly Arcan,” Annual Meeting of the Canadian Comparative Literature Association, Dalhousie University, Halifax, May 30, 2003.

“‘Willst du küssen das blanke Schwert?’: Castration and Decapitation in Heinrich Heine,” Annual Meeting of the Canadian Association of University Teachers of German, University of Toronto, Toronto, May 26, 2002.

“À la recherche du temps perdu: Temporalité et subversion dans Le Mur invisible de Marlen Haushofer,” Violence and Patriarchy in Literature and the Arts Conference: Perspectives for the New Millennium, University of Ottawa, Ottawa, October 19, 2001.

David Gosselin

Contract Faculty

David Gosselin holds a Joint Honors B.A. in German and Russian and an M.A. in German literature from McGill University. He is currently completing his dissertation entitled On Violence: The German Revolutionary Dramas from 1789 to 1968. His main research interests include German revolutionary literature and theory of violence. Among his broader interests are German Idealism, German Romanticism as well as Russian literature and philosophy. He has taught French language and culture courses at the Russian State University for the Humanities in Moscow and German language, literature and culture courses at universities in Canada and Germany, including McGill University, Université du Québec à Montréal, Bishop’s University, and Freie Universität Berlin.

Dr. Nathalie Lachance

Dr. Nathalie Lachance

Contract Faculty

Nathalie Lachance received her PhD from the department of German Studies at McGill University in 2010. Her dissertation was titled: ‘Thou shalt not believe (me)’: Nietzsche’s Ethics of Reading and the Movement for Emancipation. It won the CAUTG’s annual prize for Best Canadian Dissertation in German Studies. Her research interests include Nietzsche, decadence in literature, Kleist, and Berlin (from Benjamin and Döblin to einstürzende neubauten). She also has a keen interest in all matters pertaining to education (from the Bildungsroman to philosophy of education). She has been teaching at Bishop’s since 2009, enjoying her inspiring students and colleagues, and rooting for all Gaiters!

Es gibt in der Welt
einen einzigen Weg,
auf welchem niemand gehen kann,
ausser dir:
wohin er führt?
Frage nicht, gehe ihn.”
(Nietzsche – Schopenhauer als Erzieher)

Vera Mainka

Vera Mainka

Contract Faculty