Kirsten joined Antioch University in spring 2005 after a sixteen-year career at Vermont College, where she served as core faculty advisor and co-director of the Master of Arts Program. She was born and raised in Wauwatosa, Wisconsin, a suburb of Milwaukee, where she learned to enjoy bratwurst and root for the Green Bay Packers. As a junior in high school, the American Field Service selected her as a foreign exchange student to spend part of her senior year living in a village on the North Sea coast of Germany, not far from Denmark. This is where her life-long interest in German literature began as well as her continuing preoccupation with the Germans’ postwar amnesia about the crimes of the Nazis.
While serving as Co-Chair of Undergraduate Studies, Kirsten also teaches courses in literary modernism and in the humanities in the BA in Liberal Studies and in the Bridge Program.
She is also currently Chair of the Getty Villa Council, one of four councils of the Getty Trust that supports educational programming, antiquities conservation, exhibitions, lectures, theater, and research.