The entries in this section reveal deep personal connections to Ruth-Ellen Boetcher Joeres from three different perspectives: of a colleague; a student who stayed in academia; and a student who forged a path outside the academy. Read together, they attest to the impact over a forty-year period that Ruth-Ellen’s teaching, mentoring, and friendship has had on the authors’ personal and professional choices.

Rick McCormick’s contribution details his experiences with Ruth-Ellen over the arc of his own career, from their first meeting at a Coalition of Women in German (WiG) conference to their eventual collaboration as colleagues in the same department at the University of Minnesota. His essay chronicles the mentoring Ruth-Ellen provided and the example she set for him as she shaped the department they shared, and the field of German feminist studies more broadly.

Shawn Jarvis focuses on her discovery, long after grad school, of Ruth-Ellen as a scholar, feminist activist, and theoretician. She reviews Ruth-Ellen’s scholarly production chronologically as a window into her evolution from a young, canonically trained Germanistin to a leader in feminist theory and thought. Shawn also reflects on Ruth-Ellen’s legacy as mirrored in the work of her students and advisees.

Sarah Stephens’s entry describes three formative experiences with Ruth-Ellen that influenced her critical thinking, her professional life as an international manager for opera, and her life as a feminist. All her encounters—from her first as a wide-eyed undergraduate with “the new young female professor,” to grad school in the seminar “German Women Writers,” and years later, as Ruth-Ellen mentored her in the delayed completion of her MA—ultimately took her on a journey of feminist choices and led to choosing a feminist life.

Three words dominate this section: teacher, mentor, and feminist. The contributions chronicle how we have evolved together with Ruth-Ellen; what she modeled has become our way of interacting with the world. Each of us whose lives she touched feels her presence in the choices we continue to make.