About Your Instructors
Instructor: 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 Discover German 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 Discover German 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).
Video Lecturers
Franz Futterknecht
Franz Futterknecht is Emeritus Professor of German. He was born and raised in Germany, studied German and Romance Languages and received his Ph.D. and Habilitation at the University of Mannheim. He initiated the exchange between the University of Mannheim and UF, and he directed the UF Summer Program several times. 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.
Christina Overstreet
Christina Overstreet retired as 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.