Robert Jenkins - robert.j.jenkins@vanderbilt.edu


I am a recent Ph.D. in German and former Graduate Teaching Fellow with the VU Center for Teaching. After earning my undergraduate degree in 1992 (German, English, Linguistics), I studied contemporary German literature as a Rotary Scholar in Erlangen, Germany. Following that year abroad, I taught German for 3.5 years. In 1998, I completed the M.A. degree in German at UC Santa Barbara and shortly thereafter began studies at VU. A DAAD grant enabled me to begin dissertation research at the DLA in Marbach in 2001-02. In 2003-04, I received a Teaching Fellowship with the Vanderbilt Center for Teaching, where I mentored teaching assistants, professional students, and post-docs; facilitated pedagogical and technological workshops; and chaired the Professional Development Committee for the Future Faculty Preparation Program.
In addition to my experiences as a German Instructor, Teaching Assistant and Teaching Fellow, I had the opportunity to teach for one year in the Dept. of Comparative Literature at VU. There I taught an introductory writing course entitled Literature and the Interpretation of Culture. In this course, I facilitated with my students a semiotic approach to the analysis of cultural artifacts ranging from world literature, film and mass media to the contemporary phenomenon of media spectacle.
Currently, I am Visiting Lecturer in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. My Fall teaching duties include “Introduction to German Literature,” “Translation in Theory and Practice,” and “The Grimms’ Fairy Tales in Their Modern Context.” The Fairy Tale course is an advanced writing course cross-listed within the departments of English and Comparative World Literatures. This spring semester I will teach the Fairy Tale course again but in a large lecture format with several discussion sections. In addition to overseeing the teaching assistants for this large course, I will teach “German Composition and Conversation.” In the coming first summer session, I will direct the Intensive German 103 Course Abroad in Vienna, Austria.
I successfully defended my dissertation on May 14, 2007 and graduated August 10. My dissertation—under the title “Model-Readings of Modernist Epic: Pursuing Semiotic Strategies in the Work of Alfred Döblin”—focuses on necessary reading strategies textually constructed through semiotic devices in Döblin’s modernist epic-novel.
My dissertation research has guided my curiosity recently toward the nexus of literature, cognitive poetics, and semiotic systems and language (as complex adaptive systems). I am also keenly interested in communicative, second language acquisition and semiotic applications to SLA. I thoroughly enjoy what I do because I believe passionately in the positive global-cultural, socio-political, and economic byproducts of language/literature/culture education. Teaching reading and writing, both in German and my native English, is of great interest to me too. I find it satisfying to help students find the pleasure in reading so-called “difficult” texts and again in being able to write something meaningful about them.
My principal literary interests include the late 19th and 20th centuries, conflicts between urban-modernism and spirituality, the avant-garde, “postmodernism” and socio-literary theory, and, most recently, Fairy Tales. Writers I take a particular interest in are Nietzsche, Döblin, Brecht, H. Broch, Hesse, Koeppen, Max Frisch, G. Grass, and Brigitte Burmeister. Theoretical and philosophical interests include reader-centric theory, semiotics, philosophy of language, cognitive poetics, and critical theory. Theoretical and philosophical writers of special interest are Umberto Eco, C.S. Peirce, Wittgenstein, and Karl-Otto Apel.