Background

Katherine Marie Arens was born on November 25, 1953, in Chicago, Illinois, United States. She is a daughter of Edward James Arens, an electrical and mechanical engineer, and Eleanor (Baumgartner) Arens.

Education

Arens received her bachelor's degree from Northwestern University in 1975. She graduated from Stanford University as a Master of Arts in 1976, as well as a Doctor of Philosophy five years later. She also attended the University of Vienna for a year from 1978.

Career

Arens began to serve at the University of Texas at Austin as an assistant professor from 1980 to 1986, rising to an associate professor from 1986 to 1993. Arens has been working as a professor of Germanic languages and studies since 1993.

Her writings include such titles as Functionalism and Fin de siecle, published in 1984, Structures of Knowing, published five years later. She is also a co-author of Reading for Meaning and Austria and Other Margins, written with J. Swyffart and H. Byrnes. Arens's two most recent books Vienna's Dreams of Europe and Belle Necropolis, both in 2015, illustrate her engagement with cultural and intellectual history.

Arens has conducted researches on German idealism and on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century German and Austrian literature and culture, as well as on European Romanticism, history of science and psychology. Her current projects include a monograph on germanophone thought between Kant and the Vienna Circle, and she also studies fascist rhetorics in the context of postwar FRG thought.

Achievements

• Arens is mostly known as a professor of Germanic languages and studies at the University of Texas, who made a great contribution to the educational process. She became the Best Graduate Teacher of the Graduate School at the University of Texas at Austin two times, in 1997 and 2016. Arens was awarded the Excellence in Mentorship Award by the Graduate Caucus of the American.
  
  Additionally, Arens won the Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (SCSECS) Presidential Prize for the best paper. In 2016, she received the Book Prize Honorable Mention for her book Vienna's Dreams of Europe from the Center for Austrian Studies in Minneapolis.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Functionalism and Fin de Siècle

    (Fritz Mauthner's Critique of Language; This book investig...)

    1984
  • Vienna's Dreams of Europe

    (Culture and Identity beyond the Nation-State; Vienna's Dr...)

    2015
  • Remapping the Foreign Language Curriculum

    (An Approach Through Multiple Literacies)

    2005
  • Structures of Knowing

    (Psychologies of the Nineteenth Century)

    1989
  • Belle Necropolis

    (Ghosts of Imperial Vienna)

    2015
  • Reading for Meaning 1991
  • Austria and other margins 1996

Membership

Arens is a member of the American Association of Teachers of German, the Modern Language Association of America, the American Philosophical Association, the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, the Germanistic Society of America, the North American Association for the History of the Language Sciences and the Organization for the Study of Communication, Language and Gender.

• 

  Arens was inducted as a member.

  European Academy of Sciences and Arts , Austria

  2011

Connections

Father:

Edward James Arens

Mother:

Eleanor (Baumgartner) Arens