Nicole Coleman
Director of Global Studies and Coordinator of Faculty Engagement and Global Learning
Nicole Coleman
Office Location
4031 Faculty/Administration Building
Biography
Born and raised in Germany, Nicole Coleman has always been interested in literature, history and cultures. During her undergraduate years, she spent one year at Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic, where she studied transitions to democracy. After she received her M.A. in Political Science (Development Policy), Modern History and Comparative Literature from the University of Bonn, Germany (2007), she spent one year in Montenegro where she taught German language and culture classes at the local university and traveled widely. Back in Germany, she taught German to immigrants in Berlin.
Nicole was able to connect all these different interests (human rights, interculturality, migration, and literature) that developed through her studies and travels in her Ph.D. studies and continues to research and teach in these areas at Wayne State University.
Nicole has been a member of Wayne State's Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures since August 2015 where she teaches all levels of German language, seminars on human rights and literature, and Global Studies classes. Her main research interests include 20th and 21st century German literature, intercultural literature including but not limited to migrant and minority literature, and the intersection of literature and human rights. Her book, "The Right to Difference: Interculturality and Human Rights in Contemporary German Literature," was published in October 2021 by the University of Michigan Press. It analyzes the relation of alienness and human rights violations in intercultural German literature since 1990. She examines in what ways alienness is constructed to allow for the violation of specific groups of people and demonstrates to which extent literature can negotiate, overcome and reconcile human rights abuses as well as the underlying constructions of alienness.
Education
Ph.D., German studies, University of Connecticut
M.A., political science, modern history and comparative literature, University of Bonn, Germany
Certificate for Teaching German as a Foreign Language, University of Bonn, Germany