Barbara Hui is a graduate student in the Comparative Literature department at UCLA. She is in the early stages of writing her dissertation on the archive--broadly defined to include literature and the digital database in addition to the traditional state archive--in the twentieth century German context. One of the chapters of her dissertation will treat W.G. Sebald's novels, looking at the way in which they thematize archivization, and also how they can be understood as being archives themselves.

Prior to starting at UCLA, Barbara was a database computer programmer, and she is happy to have this opportunity to bring together her interests in computer technologies and non-digital cultural material. She plans to create a digital companion piece to her dissertation that will utilize the properties of the medium in order to visualize and explicate its ideas more fully. Barbara is also currently working as a computer programmer and core project team member on UCLA Germanic Professor Todd Presner's Hypermedia Berlin site (www.berlin.ucla.edu).

Jonathan Jones is a grad student in the UCLA department of Germanic Languages.

My transition into German Studies was ultimately a natural one even though it took a rather circuitous route. While pursuing degrees in Film Studies at the University of Texas at Austin and later at New York University, I developed an interest in Holocaust cinema and the problem of German national identity. After my undergraduate studies, I parlayed my language skills and my fondness for German culture into a year of study in Berlin at the Technical University, which is what, I believe, motivated me to bring the two fields together. Formally changing disciplines at UCLA offered a more expansive literary and philosophical platform from which to pursue my interests. Here I delved into aesthetic theory and the canon of the Frankfurt School as well as broadened my focus from film to visual culture. I am currently writing a dissertation, which, inspired by the spectacle of 9/11, examines the zealous visualization of catastrophe and destruction and the interrogation of that zealousness in art, literature and film around the turn of the millennium (e.g. the work of W.G. Sebald, Art Spiegelman, the BodyWorlds exhibition by Günter von Hagens). In addition to teaching language courses and serving as Teaching Assistant for several literature and film courses, I have also been a TA on the department's Berlin-Prague-Vienna Summer Travel Study Program in the summers of 2003, 2004, and 2005 and was the co-developer and co-instructor of the "German Retreat Weekend," a one-day total immersion program for language students.