Congratulations to our Germanic Studies MA and PhD students who completed their programs in 2025!
CENES graduate students thrive with the support of a dedicated group of faculty mentors, caring and knowledgeable staff, and a dynamic community of fellow graduate students. We would like to recognize some of our MA and PhD students who have recently completed their programs and successfully defended their theses and dissertations. We wish them continued success as they embark on the next chapter of their journeys.
Steve Commichau, PhD in Germanic Studies, 2025
“I am grateful for the outstanding support I received from faculty, staff and colleagues during my time at the CENES department and greatly enjoyed the collegial atmosphere. I feel like my time at the department prepared me well for my post-graduation journey.”
Abstract: This multidisciplinary project, informed by queer theory and media studies, calls for broadening the framework of monster studies by accounting for the complex bodies, non-bodies, and auxiliary embodiments surrounding the figure of the ghost in non-fictional texts. In four exemplary German Protestant texts from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, I trace how the ghost is introduced to serve a specific agenda or to enable the articulation of an event. Ghosts then take on an ungovernable agency as an active participant within the unfolding narratives. These narratives, I argue, are not a misrepresentation of reality. Instead, they rearticulate an experience or intention into a polysemous narrative that then acts back onto material reality, shaping it in turn. By following the figure of the ghost through the cracks in the narrative, we can access information about the texts’ contemporary environments. I examine this reality-shaping and commentary capability of ghostly figures with a methodological framework that is both media-conscious and informed by gender studies. I use this methodology to analyse two administrative records from early modern Württemberg on the cusp of late medieval/early modern state structures and modern-era bureaucracy and two anonymous pamphlets between the catastrophes of the so-called Little Ice Age and the Thirty Years’ War. These self-contradicting texts exemplify the process by which fractured realities, incongruous beliefs and not fully consciously held knowledges enter into narrative and are personified in seemingly impossible apparitions. The attempts to handle the fractured reality signalled by the ghost in turn changes and fractures the material, legal, and social reality of flesh-and-blood people while highlighting, and changing the perception of, their own bodies.
Ajibola Fabusuyi, PhD in Germanic Studies, 2025
Sankofa and Black German autobiographical nonfiction and filmmaking
“Earlier on in my doctorate program, I set out to contribute to European Studies scholarship from a Black/Afrocentric perspective that challenges prevailing Eurocentric frameworks. With the comprehensive support I received at CENES, especially from my graduate and examination committees, as well as my collegiate fellow graduate students, I conducted a Sankofa-inspired study that broadens the scope of German studies by affirming diasporic memory as key to shaping collective futures beyond borders. I am deeply grateful for this support.”
Abstract: Black German cultural production of the last decades reveals that Black Germans are drawing on their Black and African ancestry as a response to their silenced histories. However, the existing Western-oriented concepts in humanities scholarship often account for Black Germans’ experiences from the perspective of whiteness. This dissertation examines Sankofa practices in the pursuit of Black self-actualization in Black German’s creative works. It explores how Sankofa enables autobiographical cultural productions to become radically distinct and more authentic in expressing intersectional realities of Black lives in Germany in their process of (re)discovering Black and African identities. The project aims to theorize Black German studies from within this Sankofa-refracted lived experience of Black Germans. It seeks to activate Sankofa as an analytical category through close analyses of Ika Hügel-Marshall’s Daheim Unterwegs, ein deutsches Leben (Invisible Woman: Growing up Black in Germany) and Ines Johnson-Spain’s documentary film Becoming Black. The study is grounded in Black studies, postcolonial theory, and cultural memory studies. Close reading and scene analysis methods are employed to trace thematic patterns and intertextual links across media. The analyses reveal that Black German cultural producers resist their historical erasure by invoking ancestral memory and counter-narratives of German nationhood. These interventions reclaim space within the German cultural archive and redefine what it means to be German in a global context. The dissertation furthermore argues that African-centric epistemologies can refine ongoing critique in the broader domain of German studies. It suggests that Sankofa can be a theoretical and methodological pillar. By centering Black German voices using a Sankofa lens, this research expands the scope of German Studies and contributes to a broader understanding of European racial politics. It also affirms the significance of diasporic memory in shaping collective futures beyond the confines of the nation-state.
Rachel Helmer, MA in Germanic Studies, 2025
Demythologizing the Mennonite peacemaker myth among serial-settler Mennonites
“I am so incredibly grateful to David Gramling for choosing to be my supervisor. David is an incredible mentor who believed in me even during the most difficult times. In addition, Tim Frandy and Ervin Malakaj (my committee members) also believed in my potential and guided me through to the end, and I will be forever grateful for their impact on my life. I would also like to thank Caroline Rieger, Kyle Frackman, Markus Hallensleben, and Tom Kemple for supporting me throughout the program because my thesis would not be what it is without their guidance.”
Abstract: This thesis examines how the “peacemaker myth”, which claims that Mennonite settlers brought spiritual and material prosperity to Indigenous communities, remains a form of settler-colonial denial in Paraguay today. While Mennonite settlers continue to claim that they peacefully coexist with Enlhet and Enxet peoples, their actions result in displacement, subjugation, and environmental destruction. Mennonites left Canada in the 1920s to resist forced assimilation, yet began imposing their own cultural and religious values upon Indigenous communities in Paraguay as soon as they arrived. The hypocrisy of the Mennonites who left Canada, preserving their autonomy while using their powers to deny the same to Indigenous peoples in Paraguay, is an exercise in settler-colonial impunity: importing lessons of domination learned in one settler setting into another subsequent settler setting. Highlighting Indigenous protests, this thesis argues that such resistance dismantles the peacemaker myth by revealing the ongoing effects of Mennonite-led environmental destruction, economic dependency, and cultural erasure in Paraguay. By situating Mennonite expansion within the broader discursive framework of the Doctrine of Discovery (see Miller 2019), I trace a pattern of Mennonite “moves to innocence” (Mawhinney 1998) that shapes Indigenous-settler relations in Latin America to this day.
Sushant Pathak, MA in Germanic Studies, 2025
Material-ecocritical relationality in Juli Zeh’s Unterleuten
“UBC’s Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies along with the faculty and staff at the Department of Central, Eastern, and Northern European Studies provided me with financial and institutional support to dedicate myself fully to my research and writing. It is because of the warmth, efficiency, and ever-welcoming place provided by CENES that my fellow graduate students and I are able to focus on our studies.”
Abstract: This thesis explores how the perspectives of human characters in Juli Zeh’s Unterleuten (2016) toward particular nonhuman entities can be understood as relationship-building agents rather than purely human-centered perceptions. While such perspectives are traditionally interpreted as human projections shaped by anthropomorphic cognition or cultural frameworks, this study argues that the role of nonhuman entities themselves in shaping and affording these perceptions warrants greater attention. Set in the fictional village of Unterleuten, the novel provides a rich ground for examining how human and nonhuman relationships are materially and affectively intertwined. Building up on the concepts of relationality, phenomenology, and sociomateriality, this thesis demonstrates that the characters’ motivations are not merely products of personal histories or individual experiences, but are deeply influenced by their entanglements with the village environment, for instance the wind, forests, animals, and especially the village land. Furthermore, it investigates how these relationships are disrupted and transformed with the arrival of a renewable energy corporation, highlighting the dynamic interplay between human and nonhuman agencies within a shared ecological and social space.
