Jenny Strakovsky ’09

Jenny spent a Fulbright year at the Humboldt Universität in Berlin before beginning her graduate program. She writes, “Things are going very well. That freshman writing seminar on the Künstlerroman turned out to have lasting consequences! I am still at Stanford, working toward a PhD in German Studies, and plan to graduate in June 2016. Currently, I’m in the thick of the dissertation-writing adventure, studying 19th-Century novelist Gottfried Keller and his depictions of romantic love and marriage. In just a few weeks, I will be traveling to Zurich, Keller’s hometown, to check out his novel drafts and letters in the archives of the Zentralbibliothek. And just before I leave for Switzerland, I am visiting Old Salem, NC, for a paleography workshop to learn to read old German script. It should be fun. By the way, I finally caught the Silicon Valley start-up bug and got involved in a Stanford start-up. It's an online tool for humanities seminars, which lets students annotate their class readings online, compare notes, etc. We’ve been doing research on how faculty teach upper-level seminars and how students learn in the humanities. It’s been super-interesting to work with students from Education, and to think about literature and the humanities ‘like a social scientist.’”