Brian McInnis - brian.t.mcinnis@vanderbilt.edu

After studying German and History at the University of Northern Iowa, I moved to Minneapolis in 1996, where I worked with Evelyn S. Firchow interviewing Amish German speakers in southern Minnesota. In 1998, I moved to Nashville to study German literature at Vanderbilt. After taking my M.A. in 2000, I received a DAAD grant to begin dissertation research in Germany starting in the fall of 2001. In Germany, I studied the intersection of historical anthropology and literature in Bochum with Carsten Zelle and Peter-André Alt. In 2003, my research of Enlightenment magazines took me to the Interdiszipläres Zentrum für die Erforschung der Europäischen Aufklärung in Halle an der Saale and the Herzog August Bibliothek in Wolfenbüttel. Through Vanderbilt’s Center for the Study of Religion and Culture, I returned to each of these cities for further research during the summer of 2004. I am currently writing a dissertation titled “Reading the Moral Code: Theories of Mind and Body in Eighteenth-Century Germany.” I have enjoyed numerous opportunities teaching first- and second-year German language and culture courses at Vanderbilt. After serving as a Teaching Assistant for a Humanities course in Spring 2004, I am excited to teach this course, titled “Confronting the Self – Defining the Self,” during Spring semester 2005. In 2004, I was pleased to co-coordinate student-focused sessions for Vanderbilt’s annual Holocaust and Other Genocides lecture series. In my free time, I enjoy exploring film, local theater, cooking, and I am an avid cyclist.