- I am on sabbatical leave May 2022 through August 2023
- see my Davidson College page for more info about my work & for my contact info
- cv (Dec 2021) here
- My family and I have been honored recently with an endowed professorship in the humanities in our names. Thank you Jon Morris ’94 for your transformative gift.
current work:
- new and ongoing archival project about German-Jewish diasporic and Holocaust and apartheid experiences through photographers’ eyes https://writingofmemory.scottdenham.net/
- 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)
- Follow-up resources for the Davidson Learns / Town of Davidson Senior Scholars lecture on why teaching Maus matters now more than ever.
- 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)
upcoming courses:
- fall 2023: both sections of beginning German and a seminar in German on Thomas Mann’s novel Der Zauberberg
- spring 2024: Intro to German Literary Studies (previous version below) and a first-year writing course Trauma Literature
recent work, reading courses and independent projects with students include
- With my colleague Barbara Mann I co-taught a National Humanities Center webinar Why Teaching Maus Matters Now More Than Ever.
- 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
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.
