Dr. Derek Hillard Assistant Professor of German EH 23B 785-532-1934 dhillard@ksu.edu CV After receiving my PhD in Germanic Studies from Indiana University in 2001, I spent an additional year as a Visiting Lecturer teaching courses on Franz Kafka and German Cultural History at Indiana before coming to Kansas State University in 2002. At Kansas State I have particularly enjoyed teaching courses in German literature and culture with an anthropological bent, including one on grammars of violence and another on the politics of eating, subjects that I would like to develop further in teaching and research. I have completed a book manuscript on the modernist, German-Jewish poet Paul Celan. Another project called "Sacrificial Selves" that I am currently working on investigates the question of sacrifice and sovereignty in literature and philosophy between 1800 and 1930. Other long-range projects include the tentatively entitled "The Last Word" which discusses the last poems written by some modernist poets including Baudelaire, Valéry, Stefan George, Rilke, Trakl, Emily Dickenson, Hart Crane, and Gottfried Benn. The contradictory status of last poems means that while aesthetically they are often the most modern – the "last word" in poetry – they also archive what is oldest in the poet's works.