Office Hours

Fall 2008
t/b/a
Ridgley 424

Current Courses

Faculty

WILLIAM LAYHER

Assistant Professor of German

Phone 314.935.8620, Fax 314.935.7255

wlayher@wustl.edu • Website

Professor Layher is a medievalist, specializing in the literature and culture of Germany and Scandinavia in the Middle Ages. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard University (Department of Germanic Languages) in 1999. His dissertation was on the medieval German source of the Old Swedish epic “Hertig Fredrik af Normandie,” and several publications (Zeitschrift für deutsche Philologie, Jahrbuch für Volksliedforschung) have grown out of the groudwork laid there. Current projects focus on heroic codes in the pre-modern epic, monstrosity and nationalism in medieval discourse, and on female lordship in the Middle Ages. Recent lectures include presentations on Kriemhild ("Lât strîten: Violence and Specular Pleasure in Rosengarten") on beast allegories as political propaganda (“Ick kan trowen nicht beter, leue knecht: The Old Swedish Dikten om kung Albrecht and the Anti-German Backlash of the 14th Century”) and on Queen Margareta of Denmark. He is a co-founder of YMAGINA, a scholarly organization for medieval German studies, and he runs their website: http://www.ymagina.org.

Professor Layher has lived and worked abroad in Germany and in Sweden. As a high school student he attended the St. Ansgar Gymansium in Hamburg, and he spent his junior year abroad from Northwestern University at the Ruprecht-Karls Universität in Heidelberg. One summer during graduate school he worked as a Bühne- und Beleuchtungstechniker at a summer theater in the thriving metropolis of Ettlingen, near Karlsruhe. A Fulbright grant enabled him to spend the academic year 1997-98 doing literary and paleographical research in Old Norse and Old Swedish at the University of Gothenburg and in Stockholm, Sweden.

Office Ridgley Hall 424	Mailing Address Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures Campus Box 1104 Washington University St. Louis, MO 63130-4899
Mailbox Ridgley Hall 319

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