Start Here: Presenters
Start Here: Presenters
Dr. Franz Futterknecht
Dr. Franz Futterknecht, Ph.D. 1975, ‘Habilitation’ 1983 at the University of Mannheim/Germany, has been Professor of German in the Department for Languages, Literatures and Cultures (former Department of of Germanic and Slavic Studies) at the University of Florida since 1988. He started his academic career in Germany, studied in France and Italy and taught in Germany, Great Britain, and Canada, before he moved to the United States. He is a literary historian who has widely published on literary topics covering the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries. Since the advent of the Web and the availability of constantly improved teaching and learning software, he has developed a wide range of online language, culture, and literature courses.
These courses are designed to increase the authentic language and cultural input, to the extent that they have been called “virtual immersion” courses. He draws on his own intercultural experiences and the many occasions when he has taken students abroad, to understand the crucial importance of cross-cultural knowledge on having a positive experience in a different culture.
He played a key role in establishing an exchange program between the University of Mannheim and the University of Waterloo, Canada, where he taught three times. He also initiated the exchange between the University of Mannheim and UF, directed the UF Summer Program several times and took German high-school teachers to Germany when he taught and co-directed the German Summer School in the southeast.
Due to his technical expertise as a course designer, as well as his expertise in intercultural issues, he has taught workshops on teaching technology and course design. He presented his courses in Germany and at the China Institute of Higher Education in Beijing in 2006. He has also received a major contract to develop a virtual cultural learning environment for Chinese culture.
Dr. Will Hasty
Will Hasty (Ph.D., UC Berkeley, 1987) is Professor of German Studies and Co-Director of the Center for Medieval and Early Modern Studies. He has published widely on medieval and early modern German literature, particularly on the Arthurian romances. He has been actively involved in coordinating study abroad programs for students of German (the B1-B2 Intensive German Program in Mannheim) and students in Medieval and Early Modern Studies (the Medieval and Early Modern Studies Program, also centered in Mannheim).
Dr. Hasty has also been actively involved in the creation of online courses in German Studies and Medieval and Early Modern Studies, and for more than a decade has been a member of the Discover German team. Based on his experience with the DG course sequence and collaboration with its creators Drs. Futterknecht and Overstreet, and based as well on his conviction concerning the potential of the Web to help integrate the German Studies curriculum from beginning to advanced levels, he published an article in 2006 in the premier journal for applied linguistics in German Studies in the USA that also included an overview of the DG course sequence at that time (“Theory meets Praxis: From Derrida to the Beginning German Classroom via the Internet.” Die Unterrichtspraxis / Teaching German 39 1-2: 14-23).
Dr. Christina Overstreet
Christina Overstreet, Ph.D. is a Master Lecturer in the Department for Languages, Literatures and Cultures. She is a native speaker of German and trained in Foreign Language Pedagogy and Second Language Acquisition. Dr. Overstreet has directed the Summer Program at the University of Mannheim and has extensive experience in teaching German language and culture on the beginning, intermediate and advanced levels. She has been instrumental in developing and implementing web-based courses that present language in the context of culture. Her research interests include the effective integration of new technology into the foreign language classroom.