Last fall a new colleague, Petra Dierkes-Thrun (PhD University of Pittsburgh, 2003), joined the English Department faculty at CSUN.  Petra’s teaching and research specialty is Modern British Literature (roughly the period from 1880-1939).  Born and raised in Germany, Petra originally trained to be a high school teacher there, earning degrees in English, German, and Catholic Theology at the Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn, before relocating to the United States with her husband Sebastian in 1996.  Her graduate studies in the PhD program at the University of Pittsburgh allowed her to combine her interest in literary and cultural studies of the Victorian and Modernist periods with courses in film studies, gender studies, and critical theory.  She picked a dissertation topic that again allowed her to draw on these interests, writing on 20th-century adaptations and transformations of Oscar Wilde’s play Salomé (1891) in literature, film, opera, and dance.

In her first year at CSUN, Petra says she is already very impressed with her new students and colleagues: “I really like the friendliness, openness, and personal touch of the students as well as the faculty here, and the diversity one can observe everywhere on campus.”  Of her students she says, “I am especially impressed that so many of our students hold jobs and work for their living, at the same time as they are going to school.  That takes a lot of dedication to education, and illustrates a real desire to be here.  I feel very lucky that I can be part of their educational journey.”  Aside from keeping busy teaching her classes in Victorian and Modernist literature, Major Critical Theories, and a graduate seminar on “Gender and Modernism” this year, Petra is working on her first book manuscript, tentatively entitled Salome’s Modernity: Modernism and the Aesthetics of Transgression.  Petra blames her love for research for making her a “big archive nut”; she likes to dig deep into the library stacks or a specialized archive and getting her hands on dusty old books and manuscripts, or rummaging through boxes of original letters of a particular author or filmmaker (she did this twice in recent years, once at the British Library in London, and once at the Library of Congress in Washington, DC).  “Archives,” she says, “can make literature and culture come alive, show you that these people were living and breathing human beings with some pretty cool and often wacky ideas and experiences.  Maybe our own ideas aren’t that wacky after all—or just a different kind of wacky.” 

In her spare time, Petra loves movies, theater and opera, hiking, singing, hanging out in coffeehouses with a laptop, and of course, buying more books than she will ever be able to read (or store).  She says, “As an English professor I love books, of course, but what I love even more about literature is the way I feel it connects me to both history and the present.  In my classes, I strive to illuminate and make palpable for students how texts are always part of larger cultural and historical contexts, as well as our general humanity.  Literature and other important forms of cultural expression can tell us so much about ourselves, our aspirations and dreams, but they also hold up the mirror to our face and show us our delusions and injustices. I want to share my own excitement about books, culture, and learning with my students.  English classes help students develop the kind of critical, analytical, historical, and comparative thinking that is needed to understand ourselves and our world better—where we’re coming from, why, and where we might be going.  But in my opinion, it should also provide them with some truly memorable experiences of great words and ideas--along the lines of, ‘This rocks!’”