The Blog Assistants



Hen­rike Kattoll

Before I embarked on my cul­tur­al stud­ies major at Leuphana Uni­ver­si­ty Lüneb­urg in 2018, I spent two years at a U.S. com­mu­ni­ty col­lege as a stu­dent-ath­lete in Kansas. Dur­ing that time, I was a mem­ber of the high­est-win­ning vol­ley­ball team in the college’s his­to­ry and earned my Associate’s Degree in Eng­lish. I was also award­ed a mem­ber­ship in the aca­d­e­m­ic honor’s soci­ety Phi Theta Kap­pa for my aca­d­e­m­ic per­for­mance that opened a new field for cul­tur­al exchange and learn­ing oppor­tu­ni­ties. It showed me that all of us are life-long learn­ers (or should thrive to be) because “the moment you lose curios­i­ty in the world, you might as well be dead” (Ian McE­wan). Since then I have stopped play­ing vol­ley­ball to focus on oth­er activ­i­ties I love, includ­ing read­ing, lift­ing weights, watch­ing sports, bak­ing, and cooking.



Raul Quinque

If I hadn’t found my way to the pio­neer­ing Dig­i­tal Media bachelor’s degree, there’s a good chance I’d be study­ing trans­la­tion. Instead, I end­ed up in Lüneb­urg where my unflag­ging affin­i­ty for lan­guage and lit­er­a­ture car­ried me into the Insti­tute of Eng­lish Stud­ies and the Lan­guage Cen­ter where I com­plet­ed the North Amer­i­can Stud­ies Pro­file for my com­ple­men­tary studies.

While I await my chance to cross the pond in per­son, I pave my own fan­ci­ful road trip with impres­sions from books, TV series, and movies, fic­tion­al as well as doc­u­men­tary. As blog-rel­e­vant hob­bies go, I browse ety­mol­o­gy dic­tio­nary entries and baby name web­sites for fun – because words are mag­ic. I also put way too much time and brain capac­i­ty into this short bio, and had fun doing so. Writ­ing, that is, see­ing words ren­dered on a page via pen or key­board, makes me hap­py. I hope that, as an Amer­i­can Stud­ies blog author, I might share some of that enthusiasm.



Veroni­ka M. Heinrich

When I start­ed study­ing cul­tur­al stud­ies at Leuphana Uni­ver­si­ty Lüneb­urg in 2018, I brought my pas­sion for sto­ries with me. Since then, I’ve main­ly cho­sen class­es where I focus on the inter­sec­tions between media and soci­ety. As Leuphana offers quite a num­ber of sem­i­nars not only on movie and nov­el analy­sis, but also on media in prac­tice, I learned that it’s not impos­si­ble to work in this field one day. You sim­ply have to know which steps to take.

While I ana­lyze oth­er writ­ers’ work for my sem­i­nars, I like to get cre­ative in my free time and work on my new adult  roman­ta­sy nov­els. Apart from that, fic­tion of all sorts keeps me sane when real­i­ty becomes too much.