Lisa Beesley received her BA in Language: German, French, and Spanish at the University of California in Riverside in 2008 and her MA in German Studies in Spring 2011 at California State University in Long Beach. She is currently in her first year in the PhD program at Vanderbilt. In 2009 and 2010, she studied at the Carl von Ossietzky University in Oldenburg. She has presented at the University of New Mexico (2009-2011), the South Atlantic Modern Language Association Conference (2010), the Kentucky Foreign Language Conference (2011), Ohio State University’s Kleist workshop, “Literature and the Public Sphere: The Case of Heinrich von Kleist” (2011), and California State University Long Beach’s Kleist conference, “Kleistian (pre-)Occupations” (2011), which she also co-organized. Her current research interests include German and French literature around 1800, the intersection between literature and religion, Enlightenment, Romanticism, and foreign language pedagogy. Forthcoming publications include "Woyzeck: Möglichkeiten einer literarischen Fallgeschichte: Ein Gattungsvergleich mit Schillers Verbrecher aus verlorener Ehre," in Büchner Lektüren für Dieter Sevin, ed. Barbara Hahn and Christine Richter-Nilsson (Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag, 2012), "That's the Gospel Truth: Narrative Divergence in Kleist's Die heilige Cäcilie," in Form - Violence – Meaning: Two Hundred Years Heinrich von Kleist, ed. Dieter Sevin and Christoph Zeller, (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2012), and "Schwärmerei: Kleist, Catholic Conversion, and the End of Enlightenment" in Religion, Reason, and Culture in the Age of Goethe, ed. Elizabeth Krimmer (Rochester, N.Y.: Camden House, 2012).