Image: We are excited to announce that Dr. Jan Uelzmann will be joining UGA's Germanic & Slavic Studies department faculty as Associate Professor of German in Fall 2023. Dr. Uelzmann previously taught at Georgia Tech, where he was Associate Professor of German and served as Associate Chair for the School of Modern Languages. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Texas in Austin and there earned the Texas Foreign Language Teaching Excellence Award. At Georgia Tech, he was named a 2022 Provost Faculty Development Fellow. Dr. Uelzmann's research broadly deals with the cultural history of the Federal Republic, with a particular emphasis on the postwar period. He is especially interested in West Germany's transition to democracy, and how that transition was reflected in the media and cultural production of the time. His book Staging West German Democracy: Governmental PR Films and the Democratic Imaginary, 1953-1963 (Bloomsbury 2019) examines the PR films created by the West German government under Federal Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, and how these films were used to advertise the new democracy and partnerships with the US and France. Dr. Uelzmann teaches all aspects of German studies. In teaching about the beginnings of the West German democracy, Dr. Uelzmann hopes students will develop an intercultural proficiency and sensibility regarding the shared aspects and the differences of the German and the US experiences in the 20th and 21st centuries. “You have to know where people are coming from,” he explains, “to understand German society today.” Dr. Uelzmann wants students to achieve a full breadth of experiences in studying a foreign language, and he sees a variety of media, alongside an understanding of German cultural history, as integral to those experiences. This fall, Dr. Uelzmann will teach GRMN 4510 on German political songwriting throughout the 20th/21st centuries. You can find a course description here, and Dr. Uelzmann's directory page here.
