Christina Kraenzle, CCGES Director

The Canadian Centre for German and European Studies at York University is pleased to announce that Christina Kraenzle has accepted the Centre Directorship for a two-year, renewable term beginning July 1, 2011. Kraenzle has been a CCGES affiliate since she arrived at York University in the fall of 2004 and has sat on the Centre’s Executive Committee since 2005 in her capacity as the Coordinator of the German Studies program within the Department of Languages, Literatures and Linguistics. She has also served as an executive member of the Canadian Association of University Teachers of German.

Kraenzle holds a Ph.D. in Germanic Languages and Literatures (Toronto, 2004). Her research and teaching focus on modern German literature, film and culture, with an emphasis on transnational cultural production, migration, travel, and globalization. Her recent publications include Mapping Channels Between Ganges and Rhein: German-Indian Cross-Cultural Relations (with Jörg Esleben and Sukanya Kulkarni, 2008) as well as articles in The German Quarterly, German Life and Letters, Transit: A Journal of Travel, Migration and Multiculturalism in the German-Speaking World, and the volume Searching for Sebald: Photography after W. G. Sebald.

Kraenzle’s appointment signals the Centre’s commitment to a strong research and outreach agenda in the coming years, and reflects the ever-widening scope of research housed at CCGES. “I am very pleased to be taking on the Directorship of CCGES as it continues to expand its international focus,” Kraenzle notes. “The recent establishment of the European Union Centre of Excellence, housed at CCGES, is just one project that demonstrates that while Germany continues to play a central role in Centre activities, the

Centre also offers an intellectual home to researchers working on a diverse range of European issues. My own research, which seeks to explore historical links between the German-speaking and non-German-speaking world, has offered me insight into the many ways that German and European case studies can mobilize scholarly inquiry and engage faculty members and graduate students across a wide range of fields. I look forward to welcoming affiliates from across disciplinary divides whose research contributes to understanding the complexity and diversity of Germany and Europe in the new millennium.”

Kraenzle succeeds Peter McIsaac, a colleague in York’s Department of Languages, Literatures and Linguistics and Professor of German Studies and Museum Studies who has left York for a position at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. “It is a bittersweet feeling leaving CCGES, as thrilled as I am to be joining my family full-time, since the Centre really is unique and rich in potential”, offered McIsaac. “But I am pleased to see CCGES in such good hands and wish Christina good luck in taking the Centre forward.”