Susanne M. Wagner
Dr. Susanne M. Wagner received her PhD from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Prior to joining the UALR faculty in 2008, she held teaching positions at UMass Amherst, The Citadel, and Agnes Scott College. Dr. Wagner is a German cultural and literary historian focusing on nineteenth- and twentieth-century Germany with a research emphasis on resistance literature, particularly resistance to National Socialism. Other research interests include German popular culture, and the implementation of drama pedagogy into the foreign language classroom. Dr. Wagner has reintroduced the intensive German language classes to the German Studies program and looks forward to offering seminars on such topics as WWII, resistance to Hitler, the Holocaust, and Exile literature.
Dr. Wagner developed a summer abroad study option in Berlin and Düsseldorf and a semester abroad in Erfurt, Germany. She has successfully taken the first group abroad in the summer 2010.
Dr. Wagner is the president of the Arkansas chapter of the American Association of Teachers of German (AATG), she is only one of ten recipients nation-wide of the 2010 TraiNDaF II, the Transatlantisches interkulturelles Nachwuchsförderungsprogramm Deutsch als Fremdsprache II leadership program. The TraiNDaF II program is supported through a generous grant from the Federal Republic of Germany. Dr. Wagner received the UALR Distinguished Teaching Medal in 2010, she is a teacher trainer with the Goethe Institute, the academic advisor of the UALR German club, and the organizer of the 2009 UALR German Studies Symposium: “Perspective, Progress, and Promise: After the Berlin Wall: 20 Years of German Reunification.” She is an active member in the community, holds teacher trainer workshops, and regularly presents at regional and national conferences. She recently published a book: Bühne frei für die Verschwörer. Der 20. Juli 1944 im deutschen Drama. Saarbrücken: VDM-Verlag, 2010.
In her spare time, Dr. Wagner enjoys training her dog Glück to become a service dog, she likes ballroom dancing, hiking, and biking.