Associate Professor Kerry Dunne
Convener of German, School of Languages, Cultures and Linguistics
Qualifications
BA (Hons), MA (Hons), PhD (Syd), Dip Ed (La T)
Contact
| Email: | kerry.dunne@une.edu.au |
| Room: | E11 216 |
| Phone: | 02 6773 2335 (or +61 2 6773 2335 overseas) |
I did my undergraduate (BA Hons) and postgraduate studies (MA Hons with University Medal and PhD) at the University of Sydney. I came to UNE in 1987 having taught German at the University of Sydney (1984-86), the University of Melbourne (1980-81) and having spent 1982-83 in Germany on a DAAD (Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst) scholarship.
I coordinate advanced level units in German language and literature, and have supervised research students working on such authors as Christa Wolf, Irmtraud Morgner, Margrit Schriber and Gertrud Leuteneger.
Research interests
My research is on several topics:
- Computer-assisted language learning or CALL.
- Günter Kunert, the twentieth-century writer and dissident
- Georg Büchner, the nineteenth-century dramatist, writer and political activist
- Post-war German film
My current project in CALL, involves analysing online learning in second language acquisition. A Higher Education Innovation Program grant that I won for 2005-2006 has enabled German language units to be developed using the affordances of the new technologies. The data flowing from student use of the language sites is being analysed to test the impact of online materials on independent learning.
My research in literature has been primarily on individuals' response to and efforts to give meaning to their experience of a post-Enlightenment world: a world in which the uncertainty about the existence of God means that there are few existential certainties or supports. Günter Kunert is a survivor of the Holocaust in Germany and he was later exiled from East Germany. Reconciling his life experiences with the project of finding meaning in individual experience is challenging, and Kunert uses religious allusions as metaphors for exploring the nature of human existence in the 20th century. Der Sündenfall: A parabolic key to the image of human existence in the work of Günter Kunert 1960-1990 (Lang, 1995) is the exploration of Kunert’s work from an existential perspective.
Georg Büchner and Fyodor M. Dostoevsky were writing at a time when the implications of the Enlightenment for humanity's spiritual equilibrium were only beginning to manifest themselves, and Stranded on the Shoals of Reason? Büchner and Dostoevsky in Tandem (2006) is a comparative analysis of their thematic universes.
In German film I am analysing films by prominent German directors of the post-war period. Since popular films reflect socio-cultural concerns of the director, and audience, this analysis provides an insight into the changing nature of German society.