Dr. Jill Beckman is the Director of the Division of World Languages, Literatures, and Cultures (DWLLC), Interim DEO of the Department of German, and Associate Professor of Linguistics.

Glenn Ehrstine's primary research explores the intersections of literature, religion, and politics in medieval and early modern Germany, with a particular focus on the cultural transformations that occurred between late medieval Catholicism and the early Protestant Reformation. His more recent research concerns the Catholic theatrical traditions that the Reformation erased or altered. For his teaching, he focuses on practical aspects of German language, literature, and culture that hold broader interest for students in Iowa.

Sarah Fagan’s research and teaching interests include Germanic linguistics, theoretical linguistics, and the German language.

Elke Heckner teaches in the German Department. She is currently completing a book manuscript, tentatively entitled, "Memories of Futurity: Remapping Visual Representations of the Holocaust and Genocide." Her recent articles in Shofar and New German Critque examine issues of second- and third generation witnessing in film, TV productions and memorial culture.

Kirsten E. Kumpf Baele is director of the Anne Frank Initiative and a faculty member in the Department of German. Kirsten holds a PhD in German and has presented and published on topics such as exophonic writers in Germany, the spatial turn and homeless figures in German film and prose, the aesthetics and politics of hair in film of the prewar era, forced adoption practices and control of the female body in Belgian film, and on the limitation of filmic and architectural freedoms in the former GDR.

Waltraud Maierhofer is professor of German and in the Global Health Studies Program. She teaches courses on German literature and culture and also on international culture. Her research and teaching interests include German literature and culture from the eighteenth century to the present. She is especially interested in representations of health and Human Rights issues (contraception, abortion, disabilities), in intersections of historiography and fiction, ego-documents and biography, but also book illustrations and text–image relations, and she has edited several historical documents and translations.

Bruce Nottingham-Spencer spent time abroad at the Humboldt-Universität, Berlin, Germany and the Albert-Ludwigs-Universität, Freiburg, Germany. He currently supervises the Elementary German program and teaches a variety of courses including German Composition and Conversation, and Business German. His interests include Historical Linguistics, Sociolinguistics, Language Pedagogy, Second Language Acquisition, Crime Fiction, and Germanic Mythology.