Catherine Sprecher Loverti

Catherine Sprecher Loverti grew up in Zurich, Switzerland, and first came to the United States as an exchange student at UC Berkeley. She later received a PhD from the University of Chicago and has a background in German and English Literature and Linguistics.

In Linguistics, she has focused on speech act theory in relation to the philosophy of language, and language acquisition. She has published an article on children’s understanding of irony in Wilhelm Busch’s Max und Moritz.

In literary studies, she has published on the Jewish-German philosopher Franz Rosenzweig’s concept of neighborly love as it relates to W.G. Sebald’s concept of writing history, particularly the Holocaust. She has also done extensive research in German and English Romanticism with a focus on how Mary Shelley and Bettine von Arnim helped shape the myths around these movements. Currently, she is researching different cultures’ conception of masculinity through fairy tales and their re-imaginings.

She has taught at the University of Zurich, UC Santa Barbara, the University of Portland, and the Deutsche Sommerschule am Pazifik (PSU). She joined the faculty at Lewis & Clark College in 2013, and teaches classes for the Department of World Languages and Literatures, Core, and the Gender Studies Program.