Margaret Strair

Lecturer in German and German Studies
Margaret Strair headshot

Contact

Phone 610-526-5493
Location Old Library 139

Department/Subdepartment

Education

Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania

Areas of Focus

18th and 19th-century German literature and philosophy, visual and scientific culture, foreign language pedagogy

Biography

Margaret Strair is a Lecturer of German at 91´«Ã½. She received her Ph.D. in 2022 from the University of Pennsylvania with a dissertation on synesthesia and intermediality in the literature of German Romanticism, as well as certificates in Cinema/​Media Studies and College Teaching. Her research interests include the inter-arts, visual and scientific culture, German literature and philosophy in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and foreign language pedagogy. She is currently an assistant editor of the Her research and writing have appeared in or are forthcoming in Unterrichtspraxis, The Goethe Yearbook, The German Quarterly, The Language Educator, and in edited volumes on anti-Idealism, German Romanticism, and New German Cinema. 

Since Fall 2019, she has been teaching in the Bi-Co, offering courses at all levels on language, literature, and culture. In addition to Elementary and Intermediate German, her recent seminars have included: Sinn und Wahnsinn: Literatur, Kunst und Medizin in der Literatur des 18. und 19. Jahrhunderts; Die Schatten der deutschen Romantik: Literatur und Wissenschaft; Seeing and Being Seen: Vision and Visuality in the German Middle Ages; Die Goethezeit/The Age of Goethe; Advanced German: Deutsche Märchen; Haunting Encounters: Ghosts in the 18th and 19th Century; The Letter, the Spirit and Beyond: Jewish Culture in German Literature and Thought in the 18th and 19th Centuries; and  "Under Surveillance: Literature and Visual Culture from the Enlightenment to the Present.