Heidelberg
Program Staff
Eyal Pinkas
Manager of Operations and Student Care
Instructor of Humanities and Fine Arts
Faculty-in-Residence
2026-2027
Gretchen Batcheller
gretchen.batcheller@pepperdine.edu
Professor of Studio Art - Painting & Drawing
Gretchen Batcheller is a Blanche E. Seaver Professor of Studio Art and teaches a wide range of courses in painting and drawing at Seaver College. This coming academic year will be her 13th year at Pepperdine University. As an undergraduate, she studied for two years in Dresden, Germany, and as a graduate student she studied for one year in Rome, Italy. She has previously served as Faculty-in-Residence in Heidelberg (AY 2018–2019), in Florence (summer 2015 and 2019), and in Lausanne, Switzerland (spring 2023). Her art courses are designed to take full advantage of the city’s landscape, architecture, and cultural resources, offering students a deeper, more immersive connection to Heidelberg. Gretchen teaches students at all levels and is known for creating a welcoming, encouraging environment—helping even the most nervous beginners feel confident and successful in making art. She is fluent in German and also speaks great "restaurant" Italian and French. She will be accompanied by her family—Gus Peterson, her husband; her daughter, Winefred (10); and her son, Orrin (7). Gretchen and her family are excited to grow, explore, and share in this new adventure with you all!
2027-2028
Joel Fetzer
Distinguished Professor of Political Science
Social Science Division, Seaver College
Having grown up in a long-standing, German-American "Pennsylvania Dutch" family on the East Coast, Joel S. Fetzer learned about traditional German culture from his parents, cousins, grandparents, and great-grandparents. Some of his older relatives were native speakers of German and even conversed in English with a German accent. As an undergraduate English and Government major at Cornell University, however, he demonstrated his rebellious streak by minoring in French and studying abroad at the University of Paris. As a Ph.D. student at Yale University, however, he returned to his roots by taking advanced German classes for a summer in Schwäbisch Hall, spending a semester as a Friedrich Ebert Fellow at the University of Mannheim, and writing a dissertation on immigration politics in Germany. Since beginning to teach at Pepperdine in 1996, Joel has twice served as a Visiting Scholar at Osnabrück University, conducted extensive fieldwork among immigrants in Deutschland, and published two books and many scholarly articles about German politics. His wife Christina Wu Fetzer works as a Chinese-language teacher and was born and raised in Taiwan before moving to Los Angeles after college. Their son Isaak attended Kindergarten in Germany but chose to study abroad at Pepperdine's London campus as a Sports Medicine major at Seaver College; he currently works as a physical therapist in California. In his free time, Joel enjoys biking, ice skating, learning languages, and using film cameras, activities he hopes to share with participants in the Heidelberg program. He and his wife are delighted to serve as the resident family in Germany for 2027-2028 and look forward to taking undergraduates on educational trips to political sites in Germany and to showing students how to make Chinese dumplings at the kitchen in Moore Haus.