Scott Denham — teacher, translator, scholar

I will be retired beginning June 30, 2027.
I am no longer accepting requests for manuscript evaluations, tenure and promotion reviews, or departmental reviews.

current work:

  • Readings for my Queens Senior Scholars talk in February 2027 are here.
  • “Roots Journeys as Transcultural Postmemory,” participant scholar (Projektbeteiligter, 2026-28; Austrian Science Fund grant €431,186) under the direction of Prof. Dr. Christoph Singer, University of Innsbruck
  • a two-year student centered multimodal creative arts project “Boundaries and Bridges,” focusing on German – American creative exchanges informed by history, supported by a major grant from the Halle Foundation, with colleagues Renata Berlin, Tomasz Robak, James Webb, and Joelle Dietrick and colleagues in Koblenz, Paderborn, and Berlin
  • literary translation
  • ungrading and liberatory pedagogy (see an example here)
  • antiracist and antifascist teaching and research
  • diversity, decolonization, and the German Studies curriculum

current and recent courses:

fall 2026
• German Stories and Histories I (intermediate German 201; grammar and form, and work with texts by Ingeborg Bachmann, Friedrich Dürrenmatt, and the tv series Sam, ein Sachse)
• German Memory and Belonging I (advanced intermediate German 301; focusing on memory culture and works by Katja Petrowskaja, Vielleicht Esther and Saša Stantšić, Herkunft)
• Weimar Culture seminar (in German; reading Thomas Mann’s novel The Magic Mountain (1924) in the cultural context of the 1920s)

spring 2027
• German Stories and Histories II (intermediate German 202), further work on reading and writing skills in German, with a focus on medieval German history and attention to Middle High German and early modern historical and literary texts
• Religion and Authoritarianism, with Prof. Greg Snyder (CIS 257), a new, one-time seminar including a study trip to Berlin, Leipzig, Nürnberg, and München (pending funding; permission required; in English)
• Theory and Practice of Literary Translation, with Prof. Amanda Ewington (LIT 432) (in English)


fall 2025:
• beginning German
• Ingeborg Bachmann and Paul Celan, the two most important German-language poets writing after Auschwitz (in German at Davidson, also in English as a DavidsonLearns course)

spring 2026:
• Hannah Arendt – a new course in English at the seminar level
• Wanderlust – a new seminar in German on the central European culture of walking and thinking; some walks are intentional and some not

• fall 2024: beginning German 1; Kafka seminar (in English with an extra meeting in German for students reading in German)

• spring 2025: beginning German 2; Theory and Practice of Literary Translation (with Amanda Ewington); Erinnerungskultur (in German), also as Memory Culture in English as a parallel course for DavidsonLearns; a tutorial on Ulrike Meinhof, the RAF, and Gerhard Richter; a tutorial on Gropius, the Bauhaus, and Modernism

recent work, reading courses and independent projects with students include

  • Barbara Mann and I co-taught a course on Art Spiegelman’s Maus for folks in Christian County, Missouri, in response to the attempted banning of the book by the Nixa School Board there. This took place in October, 2023, and was sponsored by the Nixa Community Branch of the Christian County Public Library, with support from the grassroots group U-Turn in Education.
  • With Barbara Mann I co-taught a National Humanities Center webinar Why Teaching Maus Matters Now More Than Ever.
  • I taught a free pop-up online (synch and asynch) course on Art Spiegelman’s Maus I and Maus II for students in McMinn County, Tennessee, after their school board, in an act of structural antisemitism, removed the book from their curriculum.
  • spring 2024: Intro to German Literary Studies, including Celan, Biermann, Marinić, Brecht, Grimmelshausen, Keun, Stanišić, Heine, Tawada, Souda, Petrowskaja; a first-year writing course Trauma Literature; Critical Theory; and with Jack Jung, the Theory and Practice of Literary Translation
  • fall 2023: both sections of beginning German and a seminar in German on Thomas Mann’s novel Der Zauberberg, with a parallel seminar in English for DavidsonLearns students
  • 2020-2024 archival project about German-Jewish diasporic and Holocaust and apartheid experiences through photographers’ eyes https://writingofmemory.scottdenham.net/
  • 2021-22, beginning German, with my colleague Dr. Emily Frazier-Rath using the OER text Grenzenlos Deutsch
  • a completely new version of my introduction to German literary studies for intermediate B1-level German learners (spring 2022); we starting with Celan and Kafka and finished with Katja Petrowskaja’s Vielleicht Esther
  • a tutorial on trauma literature with a group of students including the very first trauma studies major at Davidson (2021)
  • a reading course on Arab-German / Deutsch-Arabische Literaturen (in German) with two students each double-majoring in German Studies and Arab Studies at Davidson (2021)
  • a reading course on Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism and some selected essays (2018 and 2021)
  • a reading course on post-colonial theory (2021)
  • a summer 2020 pandemic book club on Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain with alums, students, colleagues, and new friends
  • a reading course on queer German history (2020)
  • a reading course on Marxist cultural theory (2019)
  • a workshop course on the history of Jews and Jewishness at Davidson (2019)
  • a tutorial on three novels by Christ Wolf (2018)
  • much action 2017-2021 in the radically re-imagined Humanities Program I lead as the E. Craig Wall, Jr., Distinguished Teaching Professor in the Humanities from 2017 through 2021

about the images
I like this scene from Kuhle Wampe (Slatan Dudow, Bertolt Brecht, Hanns Eisler 1932).
Kurt Tucholsky is one of my spiritual and pedagogical mentors.