2025: Jeffrey Schneider, “Uniform Fantasies: Soldiers, Sex, and Queer Emancipation in Imperial Germany”

Jeffrey Schneider’s scholarship spans a wide range of topics. His most recent project is a book-length study of the global popularity of Asian Boys’ Love (BL) television and web series. (He’s also teaching a seminar on the topic in Women, Feminist and Queer Studies, which is cross-listed with Asian Studies.) His previous research included several articles on foreign language pedagogy (with Silke von der Emde) as well as the intersections between the Prussian-German military and the modern queer emancipation movement in Imperial Germany (1871-1918). In addition to his book, Uniform Fantasies: Soldiers, Sex and the Queer Emancipation Movement in Imperial Germany (University of Toronto Press, 2023), his work has appeared in edited volumes as well as in a variety of journals, including Central European History, German Quarterly, German Studies Review, the Germanic Review, Literature & History, and the Modern Language Journal.

Like his research activities, Jeffrey Schneider’s teaching interests are diverse. In addition to teaching all levels of German language as well as German-language literature and culture from 1750 to today, he offers courses in English on Marx, Nietzsche, Freud. He also regularly teaches a first-year writing seminar (Sex Before, During and After the Nazis) as well as courses in international studies and feminist and queer studies.
In addition to his teaching and research, Professor Schneider also serves as the faculty director of affirmative action in the office of equal opportunity and affirmative action/Title IX and chairs the committee on inclusion and equity. Outside of Vassar, he is a cofounding member of End the New Jim Crow Action Network (ENJAN) in Poughkeepsie, a local community organization that fights mass incarceration and racism in the criminal legal system. In that capacity he also supervises Vassar students interested in community-engaged learning opportunities with ENJAN and its court watching program.

Erwin Malakaj specializes in late-18th- to 21st-century German media and cultural history. His research focuses on 19th-century literary cultures, film studies, queer studies, and humanities as well as language learning advocacy.
Dr. Malakaj’s first book, Anders als die Andern (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2023), concerns the aesthetics of mourning at the core of Richard Oswald’s infamous early queer melodrama. The monograph is part of Dr. Malakaj’s broader research arc concerning pre-1933 queer German cultural practice, which also includes a monograph in progress on early queer media theory and occult cultural practice tentatively titled Divinatory Cultural Techniques: Queer Media Engagement, 1900–1933.

Dr. Malakaj’s work on literary studies draws on queer theory, narrative theory, and book history in order to examine the influence of fluctuating literary markets on authorial agency and narrative form. Here, he recently completed a book manuscript provisionally titled Fragile Poetics: Precarity and Literary Form in Early Wilhelmine Germany (under review).

Following the publication of a personal essay on living with trauma, Dr. Malakaj began writing a book of essays provisionally titled, Tetka Theory: A Queer Life in the Bosnian Diaspora. The book theorizes tentative epistemologies as vital resource for navigating life in the queer Bosnian diaspora. Once completed, the book will mark the starting point for a long-term research project on the aesthetic practices of the queer Balkan diaspora.
In 2016, Dr. Malakaj co-founded the international scholarly collective “Diversity, Decolonialization, and the German Curriculum” (DDGC) and is member of its steering committee. Together with Regine Criser (University of North Carolina, Asheville) he co-edited the volume Diversity and Decolonization in German Studies (2020, Palgrave). Dr. Malakaj also serves as a co-editor of DDGC’s official blog and is part of a number of DDGC initiatives, including the DDGC Mutual Aid Network.

At UBC, Dr. Malakaj collaborates with students on initiatives to enhance UBC’s intellectual cultures for undergraduate German studies. In this regard, he helped develop Augenblick: A Journal for Undergraduate German Studies and the annual German Studies Undergraduate Research Showcase. The latter is a collaboration between the undergraduate German Studies programs at UBC, the University of Victoria, and the University of Washington.

Dr. Malakaj serves on the editorial boards for Studies in Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Literature, Feminist German Studies, and the Women, Gender and Sexuality in German Literature and Culture series.

Chad S.A. Gibbs serves as Director of the Zucker/Goldberg Center for Holocaust Studies and Assistant Professor of Jewish Studies. He is a historian of the Holocaust, antisemitism, modern Germany, and war and society. Chad’s current project focuses on gender, geography, and social networks in Jewish resistance at Treblinka. Chad has held fellowships from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Yale University Fortunoff Video Archive, the George L. Mosse Program in History, and the USC Shoah Foundation, where he remains an Affiliated Researcher.

Zucker Goldberg Center Holocaust STudies-C_hor-M