Erika Hille Rinker (MA 2002; ABD, Washington University in St. Louis) is Instructor of German. Rinker is responsible for all sections of German offered at UAB and advises all German minors. Academic interests in her discipline include nineteenth- and twentieth-century German and Austrian literature and culture, literature and medicine, translation theory and practice, and women’s writing.
Rinker’s most recent talk presented her research identifying the mimetic aphasia of Karl Kraus to the annual international meeting of the Modern Austrian Literature and Culture Association, “Illness, Madness and Criminality” (Wake Forest University, April 2006).
Rinker is currently working to complete the final chapter of her interdisciplinary dissertation by widening the scope of the presented talk to include a more comprehensive reading of Kraus’s Die letzten Tage der Menschheit as a complement to Oskar Kokoschka’s Die träumenden Knaben and Mörder Hoffnung der Frauen, Georg Trakl’s “Kaspar Hauser Lied” and “Grodek,” and Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus.