I am delighted to begin my time as the Faculty Director of UCI’s extraordinary Campuswide Honors Program, and look forward to meeting and working with CHP students, alumni, parents, and friends. So that you can get to know me better, here is some information about my background:

I come from a huge family in frosty Rochester, NY and am thus predisposed to like interacting with people, and to enjoy the Southern California climate. My academic training came in spurts before and after a two-year residence in Florence Italy. Living and working in Italy helped me determine that I was interested in studying other cultures as a profession, so I returned and earned an M.A. in Comparative Literature from the University of Rochester and a Ph.D. in German from the University of Virginia. My first professorial position was at Yale University, and I remained for four years before departing for Reed College in Portland, Oregon, making my way toward that California climate.

After three years at Reed, working with some amazing students, I accepted an offer from UCI and I have been here almost twenty years as a Professor of German. What I love here, besides the sunshine, are the opportunities offered by a young. dynamic research university where curriculum is flexible and one can make a contribution to the building of programs. UCI has a distinguished faculty, committed to cutting-edge research, but also dedicated to teaching and mentoring undergraduate students. I have been undergraduate associate dean, director of UCI’s excellent Humanities Core Course which is taken by CHP first year students, resident director of the University of California’s international education center in Germany, and director of International Education at UCI. My research currently involves conceptions of autonomy in eighteenth-century European literary and philosophical discourse and illusions of autonomy in a variety of contemporary contexts. I have written three books and numerous articles.