Kahn, Lisa

Liselott Margarete "Lisa" Kahn (née Kupfer; July 15, 1921 – July 3, 2013) was a German-American poet and scholar of psychology and German studies. She studied at the University of Heidelberg, where she obtained a PhD in psychology in 1953. She married the German-American scholar Robert L. Kahn and emigrated to the United States, where she was a teacher at The Kinkaid School from 1964 to 1968 and professor of German at Texas Southern University from 1968 to 1990, serving as head of the foreign language department from 1988. In her scholarly work, Kahn was concerned with the experience of German-speaking immigrants to the United States, among other topics. She especially studied American women writing in German and edited an anthology of related work. As a poet, immigration and the related ambiguous feelings towards the home country were among her themes. She was one of the most productive American poets writing in German and was described as the "foremost German Texan poet" and a "prototypical example" of a German-American author. Kahn received several awards and distinctions including the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany in 1990.