Since the Spring of 2009 I am a PhD student at the Vanderbilt German Department. My M.A. degrees are in English and German, earned at The University of Kansas (Lawrence) in 2004 and at the Georg-August-Universität Göttingen (Germany) in 2006. In the following two years I went through a teacher training at the Christian-Gymnasium in Hermannsburg. There I taught pupils and students aged between 10 and twenty years, constantly reflecting on my teaching practice, trying new methods and developing my teaching skills further. The highlight of these two years was reading E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Der goldne Topf with students aged about 20. We had several good laughs when the students for example wrote a small text, “romanticizing” an episode from their daily life in school. E.T.A. Hoffmann still is among the authors I am most enthusiastic about. Other favorites are for example Hannah Arendt, Hilde Domin, Ulla Hahn and Thomas Bernhard. Since my arrival at Vanderbilt I also discovered an academic interest in film and film theories such asTom Conley’s Cartographic Cinema or Laura Mulvey’s Death 24x a Second. My teaching here has been language teaching for the most part. So far I have taught a beginning and an intermediate German class, both of which I enjoyed tremendously.