Selected Presentations & Appearances
Service to the Profession
Referee for submitted articles
Service to the Profession
Service to Duke
Committee established to review and propose changes to the general education requirements of the Duke undergraduate curriculum.
Committee to establish a full, four-year liberal arts curriculum at Duke-Kunshan-University in China.
Played significant role in drafting new content and format of end-of-course student evaluation form.
As Associate Dean of Curriculum and Course Development, I serve on and advise this committee on all course proposals submitted by departments and programs in the Schools of Arts & Sciences, the Nicholas School of the Environment, and the Sanford School of Public Policy.
As Associate Dean of Curriculum and Course Development, I serve on and advise this committee on undergraduate curricular proposals in the Schools of Arts & Sciences, the Nicholas School of Engineering, and the Sanford School of Public Policy.
Other ; I would like to highlight several accomplishments in 2005 for the German department: During the spring semester of 2005, we made considerable progress on our joint Duke-UNC PhD program in German Studies. We held several joint meetings with UNC German Studies faculty, and agreed upon an overall structure for the program, working out many details such as required courses, exam structure, timelines, and strategic hiring plans. Much of the credit for this goes to Ann Marie Rasmussen, who chaired the subcommittee that drafted the original proposals. I am happy to say that our continued efforts to aggressively advertise our graduate program have been successful again this year. Thus far, we have 18 applicants for the fall 2006 class, nearly as many as we had last year, breaking a trend that had been hovering around 10 – 12 for a number of years before that. Our curricular innovations of the last year continue to bear fruit. In particular, we have been able to implement our plan to offer at least one large lecture class taught in English each semester, enabling us to fulfill a part of the educational mission of the University not duplicated in other departments while at the same time providing students with no knowledge of German a gateway into German Studies. Our language program remains strong, and we have been able to attract a larger number of students to our Duke-in-Berlin program than in previous years. Overall enrollments and numbers of majors and minors have increased slightly over previous years. Perhaps our major accomplishment for 2005 has been the successful hire of Bill Donahue, a distinguished scholar of 20th century German literature and culture, who has already had an enormously positive influence on our department. I was especially pleased that the search process went so smoothly, with all department faculty working together in a most collegial and constructive manner. Among the tougher decisions we had to make this year has been the cancellation of our long and well-established Duke-in-Erlangen summer program, due to low student enrollments over the past five years. We worked hard, however, during this past fall semester, to establish a new summer program in Berlin by forming a consortium with Rutgers University in a highly successful program that Bill Donahue established while he was chair of the German department at Rutgers. By being able to offer a wider range of courses, including courses taught in English, we hope to attract larger numbers of students from a variety of disciplines to our new summer program.