Deniz Göktürk earned her PhD at Freie Universität Berlin, Germany, in 1995, with a dissertation on literary and cinematic imaginations of America in early twentieth-century German culture. She also worked as a certified translator of Turkish for law courts, hospitals and publishers for several years. Her first full-time teaching appointment was at the University of Southampton, UK, in the School of Modern Languages and the Film Program from 1995 to 2001. She joined the Department of German at Berkeley in fall 2001. She has served as graduate adviser and department chair.
She has held awards and grants from the DAAD, the Economic and Social Sciences Research Council (ESRC) in the UK, the Institute for European Studies, the Institute for International Studies, the Townsend Center for the Humanities, the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, and Digital Humanities at Berkeley. She has been an invited fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study Konstanz and the Center for Cinepoetics at the Freie Universität Berlin
On campus, she holds affiliations with the Department of Film and Media, the Berkeley Center for New Media, Digital Humanities, the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, the Center for Race and Gender, the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies, and the Program in Critical Theory. She has participated in cross-campus collaborations on “Cultural Forms in Transit” and a strategic working group on “Circulation.” She is co-founder and concept coordinator of TRANSIT, the electronic journal launched by the Berkeley German Department in September 2005, and coordinator of the Multicultural Germany Project.
Susan Oxtoby: a native of Montreal, Canada, Oxtoby is Director of Film & Senior Film Curator at Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA). In this role, she has organized several major film series, including historical retrospectives of Ingmar Bergman, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Agnès Varda, and many other filmmakers. She also served on the National Film Preservation Board from 2005-2010 and 2010-2015. In 2015, Oxtoby received the Chevalier in the Order of Arts and Letters by the French Ministry of Culture and Communication and the Medal of Honor from the Government of Georgia for her work in advancing the history of filmmaking in these two countries.
Previous to BAMPFA, Oxtoby worked at Cinemateque Ontario from 1993 to 2005, becoming director of programming in 1997. Here, she planned and presented film programming and themed series. She also directed the films All Flesh is Grass (1988) and January 15, 1991: Gulf War Diary (1992) and worked as an archivist, sound recorder, and film editor.