Welcome our new Assistant Professor of German, Dr. Robert Blankenship!

Robert Blankenship is joining RGRLL as an Assistant Professor of German. He completed his PhD at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2011 and has since held several visiting positions, most recently at Transylvania University in Lexington, Kentucky. His scholarship is concerned with nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first century German literature and cinema, and East German literature in particular. He has written a book manuscript tentatively titled “Suicide in East German Literature: Fiction, Rhetoric, and the Self-Destruction of Literary Heritage.” Dr. Blankenship sees teaching as a war against apathy, and students in his classes may find themselves discussing, collaborating, writing, translating, staging dramatic productions, performing close readings, fruitfully disagreeing, and generally flexing their imagination. His wife, toddler son, and a cat named Gato are accompanying him to Long Beach.