Karin Maxey
, University of Texas at Austin
Ph.D. Candidate
Contact
- E-mail: karin.maxey@utexas.edu
- Office: Burdine 374
- Office Hours: M 1:30-2:30 and by appointment
- Campus Mail Code: C3300
Biography
A native of Freeport, Illinois, Karin came to UT in Fall 2010. She earned her B.A. in German from Luther College (Decorah, Iowa) in 2007, during which she spent a semester abroad in Münster, Germany and wrote a bachelor's thesis on nostalgia in two post-1989 memoirs (one East German, one West). From 2007-2008, she worked as a Fulbright English Teaching Assistant in Kamen, Germany at the Fridtjof-Nansen-Realschule, where she had her first formal teaching experiences, teaching American culture and English language. In 2010, she graduated from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign with an M.A. in German, completing a Master's thesis on the intersection of New Objectivity and memory in Irmgard Keun's novel Das kunstseidene Mädchen.
Karin has taught since 2004, when she began working as a private tutor at Luther College. Since then, she has taught and tutored German and Swedish in both formal and informal settings, and served as section head for a content-based fourth-semester German course. Along with coordinating and teaching, Karin has been involved in multiple curriculum development projects, the most recent of which gave her the opportunity to develop reading modules for second-semester German. During Summer 2012, Karin worked as Assistant Language Director at Middlebury-Monterey Language Academy, a four-week immersion program for high-school students. There, she developed her leadership skills while working both as academy administrator and teacher. She is currently an instructor and section head for second-semester German at UT.
Karin's research interests primarily lie in applied linguistics, specifically foreign language pedagogy. Her dissertation work, a classroom study, investigates whether and how students in second-semester German classes learn to identify cultural perspectives and implications present in authentic, extensive texts. Her secondary focus is twentieth century German literature and culture, specifically during the Weimar Republic. She has presented work on both Weimar Republic literature and foreign language pedagogy.
In her spare time, Karin enjoys puns, singing in an Austin choir, playing the piano, playing Othello, cooking, reading, exploring Austin and traveling.
