Florence Feiereisen (PhD 2007) came to UMass twice: She spent the academic year 2000/2001 in Amherst as an exchange student through the Baden-Württemberg exchange and after finishing her Master’s degree at the Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg, she returned in 2003 to work on her PhD. She joined the faculty at Middlebury College in 2007 and is currently serving as the chair of the Department of German.
At Middlebury, Florence teaches all levels of German: from Beginning German to upper-level courses on German history, pop literature, linguistics, and sound. She has published various articles in the fields of German contemporary literature and acoustic ecology/ sound studies. Her monograph Der Text als Soundtrack, der Autor als DJ: Postmoderne und postkoloniale Samples bei Thomas Meinecke was published in 2011. Together with her friend and grad school buddy Alexandra Merley Hill (Associate Professor, University of Portland), Florence has co-edited Germany in the Long Twentieth Century (2012), an introduction to the study of sound in the German context. Her current project lies at the intersection of urban history, architecture, and acoustic ecology: she is “sounding out” working class spaces by investigating the famous/infamous Mietskaserne Meyershof (1874-1972) that housed more than 2,000 people in 257 apartments, along with small businesses and workshops in Berlin-Wedding. Her work is funded by Middlebury’s Digital Liberal Arts initiative.
Florence writes that she is grateful for her graduate school experience at UMass: “I was given a lot of space (and funds!) to develop and continue to grow as both a teacher and as a researcher. Graduate students and professors often attended scholarly conferences together and went to pedagogy workshops together. There were some high caliber students with different academic backgrounds in my cohort and collaboration was always encouraged.”
Florence and her family live in Middlebury, VT. In her free time, she coaches her sons’ hockey team.