Scott Denham, teacher and scholar (mostly teacher)

current work:

  • new and ongoing archival project about German-Jewish diasporic and Holocaust and apartheid experiences through photographers’ eyes https://writingofmemory.scottdenham.net/ ; I am currently advising seven students carrying out a Davidson Research Initiative summer grant working on this project
  • literary translation, of work by Jagoda Marinić and Thomas Medicus; I also co-taught spring 2022 the theory and practice of literary translation with Amanda Ewington (background on earlier versions of that course in this essay we co-authored with colleagues Keyne Cheshire and Kyra Kietrys)
  • ungrading and liberatory pedagogy (see examples here and here)
  • antiracist and antifascist teaching and research (also related to ungrading and liberatory pedagogy)
  • diversity, decolonization, and the German curriculum (here are the guiding principles)
  • planning a new course on Hannah Arendt for 2023

recent work, reading courses and independent projects with students include

  • I taught a free pop-up online (synch and asnych) course on Art Spiegelman’s Maus I and Maus II for students in McMinn County, Tennessee, after their school board, in an act of structural antisemitism, removed the book from their curriculum.
  • 2021-22, beginning German, with my colleague Dr. Emily Frazier-Rath using the OER text Grenzenlos Deutsch
  • a completely new version of my introduction to German literary studies for intermediate B1-level German learners (spring 2022); we starting with Celan and Kafka and finished with Katja Petrowskaja’s Vielleicht Esther
  • a tutorial on trauma literature with a group of students including the very first trauma studies major at Davidson (2021)
  • a reading course on Arab-German / Deutsch-Arabische Literaturen (in German) with two students each double-majoring in German Studies and Arab Studies at Davidson (2021)
  • a reading course on Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism and some selected essays (2018 and 2021)
  • a reading course on post-colonial theory (2021)
  • a summer 2020 pandemic book club on Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain with alums, students, colleagues, and new friends
  • a reading course on queer German history (2020)
  • a reading course on Marxist cultural theory (2019)
  • a workshop course on the history of Jews and Jewishness at Davidson (2019)
  • a tutorial on three novels by Christ Wolf (2018)
  • much action 2017-2021 in the radically re-imagined Humanities Program I lead as the E. Craig Wall, Jr., Distunguished Teaching Professor in the Humanities from 2017 through 2021

social media (occasionally on hiatus for months at a time):


@GerDavidson
@LitTransDavidson
insta GermanStudies

about the images
I like this scene from Kuhle Wampe (Slatan Dudow, Bertolt Brecht, Hanns Eisler 1932).
Kurt Tucholsky is one of my spiritual and pedagogical mentors.

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