Project Co-PIs
David Gramling
Ph.D., Professor of German Studies, UBC Department of Central, Eastern, and Northern European Studies
UBC Faculty Bio | Website | david.gramling@ubc.ca
David Gramling (they+) is author, editor, or translator of eight books in print: Literature in Late Monolingualism (Bloomsbury 2024); The Invention of Multilingualism (Cambridge University Press, 2021); The Invention of Monolingualism (Bloomsbury 2016, American Association for Applied Linguistics Book Award, 2018); co-author of Palliative Care Conversations: Clinical and Applied Linguistic Perspectives (De Gruyter 2019, with David’s big brother Robert Gramling); Linguistic Disobedience: Restoring Power to Civic Language (Palgrave 2019, with Yuliya Komska and Michelle Moyd); Germany in Transit: Nation and Migration 1955–2005 (University of California Press 2007 with Deniz Göktürk and Anton Kaes); and Transit Deutschland: Debatten zu Nation und Migration (Konstanz University Press / Wallstein Verlag, with Deniz Göktüurk, Anton Kaes, and Andreas Langenohl). David’s book-length co-translation (with Aron Aji) of Murathan Mungan’s Turkish-language Shahmeran story cycle Valor: Stories (Cenk Hikâyeleri) was published in Fall 2023 with Northwestern University Press, and made possible by a 2021 Global Humanities Translation Prize from Northwestern University.
Future books include Translating Transgender (with Aniruddha Dutta, Routledge 2026), and Aloof: On Seeing Less than you Should, which details David’s lifelong social and logistical adventure with their ocular albinism, a rare congenital visual Disability.
David is an editorial board member of Transgender Studies Quarterly (Duke University Press) and German Quarterly, and was founding editor with Chantelle Warner of Critical Multilingualism Studies, now under the editorship of Janice McGregor and Emma Trentman.
Ervin Malakaj
Ph.D., Associate Professor of German Studies, UBC Department of Central, Eastern, and Northern European Studies
UBC Faculty Bio | Website | ervin.malakaj@ubc.ca
Dr. Malakaj specializes in late-18th- to 21st-century German media and cultural history. His research focuses on 19th-century literary cultures, film studies, queer studies, and humanities as well as language learning advocacy.
Dr. Malakaj’s first book, Anders als die Andern (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2023), concerns the aesthetics of mourning at the core of Richard Oswald’s infamous early queer melodrama. The monograph is part of Dr. Malakaj’s broader research arc concerning pre-1933 queer German cultural practice, which also includes a monograph in progress on early queer media theory and occult cultural practice tentatively titled Divinatory Cultural Techniques: Queer Media Engagement, 1900–1933.
Dr. Malakaj’s work on literary studies draws on queer theory, narrative theory, and book history in order to examine the influence of fluctuating literary markets on authorial agency and narrative form. Here, he recently completed a book manuscript provisionally titled Fragile Poetics: Precarity and Literary Form in Early Wilhelmine Germany (under review).
Following the publication of a personal essay on living with trauma, Dr. Malakaj began writing a book of essays provisionally titled, Tetka Theory: A Queer Life in the Bosnian Diaspora. The book theorizes tentative epistemologies as vital resource for navigating life in the queer Bosnian diaspora. Once completed, the book will mark the starting point for a long-term research project on the aesthetic practices of the queer Balkan diaspora.
In 2016, Dr. Malakaj co-founded the international scholarly collective “Diversity, Decolonialization, and the German Curriculum” (DDGC) and is member of its steering committee. Together with Regine Criser (University of North Carolina, Asheville) he co-edited the volume Diversity and Decolonization in German Studies (2020, Palgrave). Dr. Malakaj also serves as a co-editor of DDGC’s official blog and is part of a number of DDGC initiatives, including the DDGC Mutual Aid Network.
At UBC, Dr. Malakaj collaborates with students on initiatives to enhance UBC’s intellectual cultures for undergraduate German studies. In this regard, he helped develop Augenblick: A Journal for Undergraduate German Studies and the annual German Studies Undergraduate Research Showcase. The latter is a collaboration between the undergraduate German Studies programs at UBC, the University of Victoria, and the University of Washington.
Dr. Malakaj serves on the editorial boards for Studies in Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Literature, Feminist German Studies, and the Women, Gender and Sexuality in German Literature and Culture series.
Associate Members
If you would like to join the research project as an associate member, reach out to the co-PIs. Associate members are scholars at UBC and various North American institutions in some capacity involved with the research project. They could also be scholars pursuing related research projects who are interested in being part of LLIMUs ongoing programming.
Jia Gu, LLIMU Designer
Tyler Horman, Transgender Voices in LLIMU Researcher
Nona Jalali, LLIMU Public Policy Researcher
Alexander Suyanto, Indigenous Voices in LLIMU Researcher
LLIMU Affiliated Artists
These artists were selected as part of the LLIMU Comics and Graphic Arts project in collaboration with the UBC Pop Culture Cluster’s Comics-to-Research Program. This project seeks to expand the visual language around the themes of Linguaphobia, Linguistic Indifference, Linguistic Disobedience, The Monolingual University, and/or Authoritarian Language, inviting critical, conceptual, experimental, experiential, personal, and political work of various kinds that tests the boundaries and critical power of these concepts.
Stephanie Broder
Ihomehe Agbebaku
Sydney Green
Andrea Hoff
Siming Liao
raphael saint k