Curtis Maughan earned his MA in German Studies from California State University Long Beach in the spring of 2012. He is currently a third year PhD candidate in the Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages at Vanderbilt University, where he is teaching German 101. He will be teaching German 102 in the spring 2015 semester. Curtis’s research interests include the concept of freedom in open world video games, the political texts of Thomas Mann, the novellas of Heinrich von Kleist, and the documentaries of contemporary Austrian filmmaker Harald Friedl.