Rate My Professor Silke von der Emde

Silke von der Emde is Associate Professor and Chair of German Studies and Director of the Self-Instructional Language Program at Vassar College, where she has taught since 1994. She holds a BA from Universität Tübingen and MA and PhD degrees from Indiana University-Bloomington, completing her doctorate in 1994. Von der Emde teaches courses at all levels in German Studies and in Women, Feminist and Queer Studies. Together with colleague Jeffrey Schneider, she developed Vassar’s award-winning Intermediate German Sequence utilizing the online bilingual environment MOOssiggang. She co-directs a broad initiative on the Holocaust at Vassar College and has contributed to foreign language pedagogy through co-authored publications in prominent peer-reviewed journals and books.

Her research specializations encompass memory and archive studies, Holocaust studies, literature and culture from the former German Democratic Republic, disability studies, language learning, and cultural studies. Von der Emde is the author of Entering History: Feminist Dialogues in Irmtraud Morgner’s Prose, published by Peter Lang in 2004. She co-translated and wrote the foreword for The Life and Adventures of Trobadora Beatrice as Chronicled by Her Minstrel Laura: A Novel in Thirteen Books and Seven Intermezzos (University of Nebraska Press, 2000). Recent publications include “Dis/abling Affect: Building Community out of Trauma at the International Tracing Service” in Survivors of Nazi Persecution: Beyond Camps and Forced Labour (Springer, 2024), “‘Faraway So Close’: Transcultural Memory as Christa Wolf’s ‘Last Word’” in What Remains: Responses on the Legacy of Christa Wolf (Berghahn Books, 2022), “Caring for the Dead and the Living: DPs and the Arolsen Archives of Feelings” in Tracing and Documenting Nazi Victims Past and Present (De Gruyter, 2020), and “Women in the Archive: Locating the International Tracing Service in German Memory Work” in Seminar (2017). She has published in journals such as New German Critique, German Quarterly, Women in German Yearbook, and Modern Language Journal. Currently, she is writing An Archive of Trauma: Displacement, Disability and the Politics of Remembering Nazi Persecution.