Associate Professor of German
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University Hall 3119
(205) 975-5352

Research and Teaching Interests: Twentieth-century German and Austrian Literature and Culture, Literature and Medicine, Translation Theory and Practice, Travel Writing, Women’s Writing

Office Hours: By appointment

Education:

• BA, Wake Forest University, German
• MA, Washington University in St. Louis, Germanic Languages and Literatures
• PhD, Washington University in St. Louis, Germanic Languages and Literatures

Erika Hille Rinker is responsible for all sections of German offered at UAB and advises all German minors. Both in the language classroom and in her role as the facilitator of Stammtisch, Rinker looks for opportunities to share her interests in her discipline, especially the intersections of German and Austrian literature, film, and popular medical discourses on physical, mental, and figurative confinements. Where she can, she brings in examples from her interdisciplinary dissertation, which explored instances of stutter and silence in fin-de-siècle, critical modernist literature in texts by Oskar Kokoschka, Karl Kraus, Georg Trakl, and Ludwig Wittgenstein.

In addition to growing the German program, Rinker regularly offers English-language courses required by the Foreign Language Major Common Core, including a service-learning option for the FLL 120: Foreign Cultures course. This effort has been supported through Rinker’s training as a UAB Faculty Fellow in Engaged Scholarship and an ongoing partnership with UAB’s English Language Institute. Rinker encourages students to engage in first-person, cross-cultural dialogues related directly to course objectives and expected learning outcomes in order to develop a better understanding of the constructed nature of cultures and a greater awareness of how one’s culture is perceived by others.