Jason Doerre began his career at Minnesota State Univ., majoring in German and history, where he wrote his senior thesis on post-reunification GDR nostalgia. After spending a year on a Fulbright Teaching Assistantship in eastern Germany, he spent a year studying in Austria before completing a dual M.A. in German and history at Bowling Green State Univ. in Ohio, writing a thesis titled “The Post-Reunification Aufarbeitung of the SED-Dictatorship.” He entered the Ph.D. program at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 2008, where in addition to teaching German, he worked as Project Assistant at the DEFA Film Library, handling archival film prints and translating and subtitling DVD productions. He spent the 2011-12 year at the German Literature Archive on a Fulbright Grant researching his dissertation titled “Pessimism in Progress: Hermann Sudermann and German Liberalism.”

As someone who has spent significant time in Germany and Austria, Jason is enthusiastic about teaching the German language and culture to his students and is convinced that there is hardly a better path to becoming an educated world citizen than studying another language and culture.