​Monika Shafi is Elias Ahuja Professor of German Literature, former Director of the Women’s Studies Program (2005-2010) and incoming Chair of the Department of Women’s Studies at the University of Delaware (September 2011-)). She is the author of three books, Utopische Entwűrfe in der Literatur von Frauen (1989); Gertrud Kolmar: Eine Einfűhrung in das Werk (1995); Balancing Acts: Intercultural Encounters in Contemporary German and Austrian Literature (2001), and the editor of Approaches to Teaching Grass’s The Tin Drum in the Modern Languages Series Teaching World Literature (2008). She has written numerous articles on 19th, 20th, and 21st century German literature, with a specific emphasis on women authors (such as Annette von Droste-Hülshoff, Irmgard Keun, Barbara Frischmuth, Anna Mitgutsch, Judith Hermann, Christa Wolf, and Monika Maron). Her areas of expertise also include Günter Grass, German-Jewish literature, travel writing, migrant and postcolonial literature. She is completing a book, entitled Housebound: Domestic Space and Selfhood which investigates the representation of domestic space in select contemporary German-language novels.