Maria Snyder
Interests: Dr. Snyder's research interests include 16th century European landscapes in text and image, and the historical relationship between war and mathematics, as well as book and media history. She is also interested in translation in both its creative and scholarly forms.
Teaching: Dr. Snyder teaches French and German language and literature courses. She has taught courses on European Literature (including Camus and Duras), Paris in the literary imagination, as well as on German literature of the 19th century, and the influence of Kafka on Eastern European literature in the 20th century. She has a particular interest in the history of writing and publishing and in writers of francophone West Africa. Dr. Snyder is currently the faculty advisor for the UMSL French Club.
Professional History: Dr. Snyder received her Ph.D. in Germanic Languages and Literatures from Washington University in St Louis. She has studied at the Ludwig Maximilians Universität in Munich, as well as the Universität zu Köln, where she was the recipient of a DAAD exchange fellowship. She has been the recipient of grants from both the American Friends of the Herzog-August Bibliothek and from the Dr. Günter Findel Stiftung for research at the H.A.B. She completed her Bachelor of Arts at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, where she also participated in a study abroad program at the Ruprecht-Karls Universität in Heidelberg. She has studied at the Université de Caen Basse-Normandie and has also taught at the École de Management de Normandie in Caen. Dr. Snyder continues to pursue her research at the Herzog-August-Bibliothek in Wolfenbüttel, Germany.
Professional Activities: Dr. Snyder has published and presented papers on early modern cartography and theories of landscape. She has also published numerous reviews of works on cartography, travel, and early modern and medieval history in the Sixteenth Century Journal. She is currently working on a study of the impact of military and mathematical thinking on the depiction of landscape in the writings of Sebastian Münster, Albrecht Dürer, and Hans Sachs. She has also completed several translations of works by the twentieth-century Malian writer Amadou Hampâté Ba.