Andréas-Benjamin Seyfert

Featured Works

• 

  Rethinking Jewishness in Weirmar Cinema

• 

  Goethe als Literatur-Figur

• 

  Meines Vaters Sohn

Selected Publications

Teaching Philosophy and Experience

Seyfert’s teaching philosophy is inspired by cultural studies and critical pedagogy, aiming to help students understand the cultural, political, and historical forces that have shaped the lives of diverse individuals and communities. He employs an interdisciplinary approach, combining social critique, analysis of popular culture and daily practices, and exploring pressing political issues. Through his teaching, he encourages his students to become active critical thinkers who can challenge the status quo and promote social justice. Seyfert has taught German language at all levels and developed cultural classes of his own design at both the lower and upper division levels. He has also taught classes outside the academic context at the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles.

Seyfert has been a professional German language instructor since 2011. In a university setting, his course offerings as lead instructor included “Elementary German: 1–3,” “German 98T: Dance-Brink of Abyss,” “LGBTQS 183: Queer Subjectivities,” and “From Weimar to Hollywood: German-Jewish Filmmaking Rediscovered.” He has served as a research and teaching assistant for “Introduction to German Medieval Literature,” as well as a co-instructor with Professor Maite Zubiaurre for “German 112: Contemporary Literature and Culture.” He was also invited as a guest speaker in classes taught by Professor Todd Presner, Professor Arne Lunde, and Dr. Renata Fuchs, sharing his expertise on diverse topics, including English medieval hagiography manuscripts, the holocaust in film and literature, film-noir, and digital humanities.

Community Involvement

Seyfert has made various scholarly and community contributions. He served as the Graduate Student Representative during the period of the UCLA Department of Germanic Languages merging into the European Languages and Transcultural Studies Department from 2017 to 2020. Seyfert has also participated in the EPIC Seminar in Teaching Excellence, where he collaborated with faculty and graduate students to design learning spaces that work for diverse kinds of learners, leveraging multimodal and immersive pedagogy and gamification. Additionally, he shared his insights on the pedagogical importance of Digital Humanities as a panelist at a conference talk on Digital Humanities and Graduate Education in German Studies, and he was an invited speaker at the Academic Senate Digital Humanities Program Review in February and the UCLA Humanities Advisory Board Meeting in November of 2020. Seyfert has also translated letters and documents for descendants of holocaust survivors, reflecting his own family heritage as his great grandparents fled Nazi Germany for France and the United States.

Seyfert has a long history of organizing film events, including co-founding a German film club at the University of Geneva in 2013, which still runs to this day. He leveraged his ties to the European and Hollywood film industry in organizing the 2017 film and conference series “Shadows of the 20^th Century,” which was selected as an L.A. Times Critics Choice and brought together many organizations across the Los Angeles area, including the UCLA Alan D. Leve Center for Jewish Studies, the German Department, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the American Cinematheque, and the German Consulate. Seyfert also served as the Head of Programming and then Director of GSA Melnitz Movies at UCLA from 2017 to 2021 and as Film Programming Assistant for the well-known Los Angeles film festival German Currents in 2021.