Stephanie Stoeckl, PhD, BA ’11, has been tasked with helping revive the German program at Franciscan University of Steubenville, where she is now an adjunct instructor in the Modern Languages Department and the supervisor of the Language Learning Cafe.

Stoeckl’s childhood was steeped in the German language. The daughter of German parents, she grew up speaking the language at home and visiting relatives in Germany. She knew from a young age that she wanted to learn to speak German more thoroughly. She distinctly remembers trying to explain the plot of The Brothers Karamazov to a cousin in German and becoming frustrated at not being able to formulate her thoughts into words. 

The Core Curriculum attracted Stoeckl to UD, where she majored in comparative literary traditions and German with a concentration in French. Stoeckl counts the Eichstadt Program, where German majors spend a month in the summer living and studying in Germany, as one of her most formative experiences in developing German fluency.

“It was the most intensive language experience I’d ever had. Usually, when I’d go as a child, my parents would do all the talking, but this was the first time I was there by myself and spoke nothing but German for a month,” she says. “I was also able to connect with students from all over Europe: Hungary, Russia, places I’d never met people from.”

Encountering the Catholic faith in Europe was also a new and formative experience for Stoeckl. She recalls taking a trip to Austria with a friend over Valentine’s Day weekend during her Rome semester and being approached by people on the street offering them valentines.

“Thinking they were selling something, we ignored them. When we came up out of the subway, there were these people again. This time, they asked if we wanted a valentine from God! I took one of the letters and it was a sweet love letter written from ‘God’ to His people,” Stoeckl says.

“It was really touching and a pleasant surprise since Germans and Austrians tend to be less outwardly religious, especially when it comes to evangelization. I still have the letter in my Bible.”

Stoeckl is grateful for the example of the engaging professors she encountered at UD and how her UD experience prepared her to teach in an authentic Catholic university environment.

“I have been motivated throughout the years by UD's motto, Veritatem, Justitiam Diligite. It reminds me that all authentic truth is of God and not something to be feared,” Stoeckl says.

Stoeckl speaks highly of UD’s Ivan and Laura Eidt, PhDs — known to their students as Herr and Frau Dr. Eidt — and says that Frau Dr. Eidt’s seminar on foreign language pedagogy first inspired her to think about teaching language. She hopes to use Frau Dr. Eidt’s new fairy tale book as a text for one of her future classes.

“If I could make grammar half as entertaining as Herr Dr. Eidt does,” Stoeckl says, “that would be an achievement!”

Stoeckl went on to receive her MA in comparative literature from the University of Regensburg in Germany and her PhD in comparative literature with a concentration in cinema studies from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. During her time at UD, she had begun developing an interest in early 20th-century literature, which followed her all the way to her doctoral dissertation on how authors during the Catholic Revival period theorized vicarious redemptive suffering — the concept of “offering it up” — in their novels. 

Stoeckl has now completed her first semester of teaching at Franciscan, and she is invigorated by the students and faculty she works with there, describing them as friendly and supportive. She has been teaching Elementary and Intermediate German and aspires to grow the German program to the point where it can consistently offer advanced-level courses. The Language Learning Cafe, which Stoeckl supervises, is a program of the Modern Languages Department which hosts casual coffee meet-ups where students can practice speaking foreign languages. During the fall semester, the Language Learning Cafe also hosted a Dia de los Muertos celebration and a Krashkurs (crash course) in German for students preparing to spend a semester in Gaming, Austria, where Franciscan has a campus. In the future, Stoeckl hopes to grow the relationship between Franciscan’s Austria study abroad program and the German Department.

Since Stoeckl is the sole professor in the newly-revived German program, she has been developing most of her own curriculum. She is excited to pilot a new course in spring 2024 called Introduction to German Cinema.

Becca Grillot is a 2010 UD alumna. With a background in theology and Montessori early childhood education, she is now a freelance writer and editor and a homeschooling mom of three. She and her husband and kids live in Irving and love to travel and explore.