The Coalition of Women in German Steering Committee is thrilled to announce that Dr. Maria Stehle, Associate Professor in the German Program at the University of Tennessee Knoxville, has been elected by the membership to serve as Vice President/President-Elect. Dr. Stehle has been an active WiGgie since her graduate school days and has contributed to the organization by co-editing the newsletter, organizing panels and WiG-sponsored sessions, publishing in the Women in German Yearbook, and winning the best article prize and subsequently serving on the best article committee, among countless other activities. In her candidate statement, she wrote:
Through WiG, I have experienced feminist mentorship and encouragement, I have found a community that I know has my back, and I connected with a group of scholars who work towards common goals; I am still mentored at WiG but I have also become a mentor. If WiG continues to facilitate this kind of feminist mentoring, our work is transformative.
My research is interdisciplinary, collaborative, and intersectional. The community I built through WiG has given me the courage to move forward with my projects even if, at times, I felt I had to advocate for my work to be accepted as academic and rigorous. Because we organize, exchange ideas, and share our challenges with each other, we have influenced discussions at other professional organizations, have brought issues of equity, injustice, and inequality to our home institutions—be they public research universities, small liberal art colleges, community colleges, in red or in blue states—, and have advocated for each other. As an organization, we connect and intersect with networks at the GSA, with the Decolonizing German Studies groups, and with activists and organizers at our home institutions. If WiG members do this kind of outreach and advocacy work, at our meetings and conferences, in our communications, at our institutions, nationally, and internationally, our work is transformative.
In addition to her vibrant scholarship, in which she regularly collaborates with other WiGgies, Dr. Stehle is a co-editor of the open access web publication “Digital Feminist Collective” and book review editor for the journal German Studies Review. At her home institution she serves as Graduate Coordinator for German, Chair for the Interdisciplinary Program in Cinema Studies, and Steering Committee Member for the Interdisciplinary Program in Women, Gender, & Sexuality Studies.
We are overjoyed to have such a powerful advocate of intersectional and interdisciplinary feminist German Studies on our leadership team!