Sandra Alfers

View Scopus Profile

Sandra Alfers

Professor of German, Department of Modern & Classical Languages and Director of The Ray Wolpow Institute

    Personal profile

    About

    Dr. Alfers is Professor of German and German Section Head in the Department of Modern and Classical Languages at Western Washington University and the founding director of The Ray Wolpow Institute for the Study of the Holocaust, Genocide, and Crimes Against Humanity. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in 2003 and has worked at Western since 2008. In 2013, the American Association of Teachers of German (AATG) designated Western’s German program a “National Center of Excellence.” Dr. Alfers teaches a broad range of German language, culture, and literature courses on all levels of the curriculum. Recently, she has explored the uses of new technologies in the L2 classroom; she developed a German mobile application as well as an online textbook for her third-year literature class.

    In her research, Dr. Alfers focuses on the literature of the Holocaust, particularly on German-language poetry written in Theresienstadt between 1941-1945. Her English- and German-language publications have appeared in international journals such as Monatshefte, Oxford German Studies, and Études Arméniennes Contemporaines, and her work on Theresienstadt has been translated into Czech for Terezínské Studie A Dokumenty. Dr. Alfers’ book on the German-Jewish activist and writer Else Dormitzer weiter schreiben. Leben und Lyrik der Else Dormitzer was published in late 2015 by Hentrich & Hentrich in Berlin, Germany. She is a member of the academic council of the Holocaust Educational Foundation at Northwestern University. In 2015, she received a College of Humanities and Social Sciences Radke Faculty Family Award to design a minor in Holocaust & Genocide Studies at WWU.

    Related documents

    Education/Academic qualification

    Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures, Ph.D., University of Massachusetts Amherst

    … → 2003

    Department of Modern Languages, M.A., University of Nebraska - Lincoln

    … → 1996

    B.A., University of Nebraska at Omaha

    … → 1994

    Zwischenprüfung, Universität Vechta, Germany

    … → 1993

    Abitur, Wirtschaftswissenschaftliches Gymnasium Oldenburg, Germany

    … → 1990

    Research Interests

    • Poetry from the concentration camps and ghettos (focus on German-language texts
    • Holocaust Poetry and Testimony
    • Holocaust Memorialization in Germany
    • Gender and Holocaust
    • Theresienstadt
    • Westerbork
    • Pedagogy and teaching the Holocaust in the American undergraduate classroom
    • Second Language Acquisition & Pedagogy

    Disciplines

    • German Language and Literature
    View all 11 Research outputs
    View all 7 press/media