Jeff Hertel wins the Katherine Goodman Stern Fellowship

Congratulations to Jeffrey Hertel, fifth-year CDG student, for winning the prestigious Katherine Goodman Stern fellowship for 2019-2020 from the Duke Graduate School. He writes: “It’s a tremendous honor to have won this award. I am currently in the final stages of my dissertation, entitled “Liberating Laughter: German Satire and the Dramatic Public Sphere, 1790-1848.” In the project, I focus on early nineteenth-century dramatic satire as the site of an alternative public sphere. Due to censorship of traditional print media and the comparatively backward state of the political institutions of the German confederation, liberal dramatists such as Georg Büchner and Karl Gutzkow had to get creative in communicating a message for change to their target audiences, and so resorted to a variety of clandestine strategies to turn a night of raucous laughter at the theatre into a chance for the dissemination of radical political messages. The Katherine Goodman Stern Fellowship will give me the necessary time to properly finish the project during my last year with CDG."