German Studies & the Job Market Workshop: Applying for Liberal Arts Colleges

German Studies and the Job Market Workshop are thrilled to invite Stanford graduate students to a workshop with former Stanford graduate Per Urlaub.

The Liberal Arts College: Opportunities, Challenges, and Strategies

This workshop presentation will focus on myths and realities surrounding the arguably most uniquely American type of academic institution, the liberal arts college. Participants will gain a critical appreciation of the liberal arts college’s affordances and limitations as an environment for fulfilling faculty careers in modern language and literature fields. Besides comparing opportunities and challenges for faculty at liberal arts colleges with those at R1 universities, participants will be introduced to a set of strategies that aim to help them to successfully apply for and professionally prosper in faculty positions at liberal arts colleges. 

Lunch will be served.

Per Urlaub (PhD, Stanford) is Associate College Professor and Associate Dean of the Language Schools at Middlebury College. In his administrative role, he supports academic affairs and hiring in language programs across the institution with a focus on the twelve Middlebury Language Schools and associated graduate programs offered in collaboration with sites in California, Asia, Africa, Latin America, and Europe. Before joining Middlebury in 2017, Per Urlaub was an Associate Professor of German Studies at The University of Texas at Austin, where he served as a Language Program Director, Director of Undergraduate Studies, and Director of Assessment. His main scholarly interest lies in the area of second language literacy development, in particular the development of literary reading and interpretation competencies in the second language. His publications on second-language reading, literature instruction, the modern language/literature curriculum, theater education, machine translation, instructional technology, and the role of the digital humanities in study-abroad learning environments have appeared in numerous volumes as well as in journals such as German Quarterly, French Review, Foreign Language Annals, L2 Journal, ADFL Bulletin, MLA’s Profession, System, and Unterrrichtspraxis. He has edited three scholarly volumes: Transforming Postsecondary Foreign Language Teaching in the United States (2014, with Janet Swaffar); The Brecht Yearbook 41 “Teaching Brecht” Special Interest Section (2017, with Kris Imbrigotta); and The Interconnected Language Curriculum (2018, with Johanna Watzinger-Tharp). Essays and commentary on a broad range of transatlantic topics ranging from digital human rights to ecological movements have appeared in venues such as Die Welt, The Washington Post, The Houston Chronicle, and The New Republic.