Olivia Albiero
Visiting Assistant Professor, German Studies
Dr. Albiero is Visiting Assistant Professor in German Studies. She is currently on leave from San Francisco State University, where she is Associate Professor in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures. She has over ten-year experience teaching all levels of German language, literature, and culture and she loves to witness students’ progress as they develop their ability to speak, write, and think in German. Her primary research focuses on contemporary German-language literature and culture (from the 1980s to the 2000s) and it explores questions of storytelling at critical times of change and rupture, especially when they are tied to experiences of mobility or lack thereof. Dr. Albiero also researches the way comics and graphic novels portray individual and collective stories, in particular related to issues of mobility, migration, and the (re)definition of identity. Finally, she enjoys studying how contemporary literature and culture expand to encompass multimodal projects and what writing in the digital age means. Her interdisciplinary work has been published in Colloquia Germanica, Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, DIEGESIS, Pacific Coast Philology, and literatur für leser:innen.
Dr. Albiero grew up in Italy, where she received a Laurea Triennale (B.A.) in Modern Languages, Literatures and Cultures (German, English, and Spanish) and a Laurea Specialistica (M.A.) in Modern Euro-American Languages, Literatures and Cultures (German and English). After moving to Seattle in 2009, she completed an M.A. and a Ph.D. in Germanics at the University of Washington. She studied at the Universität Wien (Vienna), conducted research at the Humboldt Universität in Berlin, and was a language teaching assistant in Tyrol, Austria.