Newsletterd Letter from the Chair
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gDepartment of Germanic Languages & Literatures Newsletterd Letter from the Chair ............2 s Highlights .....................3 Faculty Focus ................4-5 Graduate Focus...............6-7 Graduation 2015..............8-9 Undergraduate Focus ........10-11 Dutch Studies .................12 Swedish Studies ...............13 In the Classroom...............14 Staying Connected .............15 www.lsa.umich.edu/german WINTER 2016 g Department of Germanic Languages & Literatures Department of Germanic Languages & Literatures Letterds from the Chair Dear Friends, The German Department is abuzz with new faces, new ideas, new initiatives. This Fall semester marked the arrival of several new colleagues whose presence has already begun to enliven and enrich our Department. After Tyler Whitney had joined us just over two years ago, we were able to bring in two further junior colleagues. Kristin Dickinson, who received her PhD from Berkeley last year, contributes much-needed expertise on German-Turkish (and German-Ottoman!) issues, on questions of migration, translation, and world literatures. Kira Thurman joins us from the University of Akron, where she had been teaching since receiving her PhD from the University of Rochester in 2013. Jointly appointed with the Department of History, she adds to our interdisciplinary profile her deep training and expertise in music as well as her crucial scholarship on questions of race and ethnicity. We have been thrilled and proud to welcome them to Michigan. (You can read more about Kristin and Kira on page 4). In addition, we count ourselves fortunate to have Alice Goff join the Department. Under the aegis of the prestigious Michigan Society of Fellows, she will hold a three-year joint appointment in German and History. These three new arrivals are joined by our new graduate student Abigail Weisberger (see p. 7); this year’s FU exchange student Danny Gronmaier; and – thanks to a welcome University initiative to reduce class sizes – three new lecturers: Sylvia Grzeskowiak, Iris Zapf-Garcia and Britta Keener. We have been delighted to welcome them all this Fall. Meanwhile, the Department is literally buzzing for those students who are learning German, and learning about German environmentalism, in a recently introduced course on bees (see p. 14). Indeed, the coming and going of guests, and our packed schedule of events, can at times resemble a beehive of activity: between the annual meeting of the German Studies Association in Washington DC in early October, where almost two dozen (!) of our faculty and graduate students presented their research, and Thanksgiving, we welcomed Andreas Huyssen (Columbia U) for our annual Grilk lecture; mounted a fabulous graduate student conference on time and urban space (“Chronopolis”), with a fascinating keynote by Bettina Stoetzer from MIT; listened to Irene Butter share her life story as a Holocaust survivor in front of a capacity crowd in the Michigan League at the annual de Vries-Vanderkooy lecture; engaged with the novelist and New York based cultural correspondent of the Süddeutsche Zeitung, Peter Richter, who read from his recently published autobiographical novel 89/90 about the end of the German Democratic Republic; and discussed the refugee crisis in Europe. Meanwhile, we continue to teach scores of students about everything from Dativ and Akkusativ to German music, media, and modernity, from 19th century intellectual history to Nazi cinema, and from fairy tales to soccer. There is much more to report, some of which you can read about in the pages that follow. Or, better yet, come see for yourself: whether it’s for one of our many events or just to stop by and chat, we are always thrilled to welcome friends and welcome back our alumni. If you do come through, please stop by the Chair’s office for a visit! Sincerely, Johannes von Moltke [email protected] 2 www.lsa.umich.edu/german Department of Germanic Languages & Literatures Department of Germanic Languages & Literaturesg Highlightsds Grilk Lecture: Over the Years by Johannes von Moltke In 2002, a former as an interdisciplinary field in which literature and other media student in our meet, in which we draw from disciplines and methodologies department endowed across the humanities and some of the social sciences, and a lecture series to which in turn helps to articulate the histories and the place of honor his teacher “things German” in those fields. Indeed, Professor Huyssen’s and mentor, our work has been enormously influential also in museum and emeritus colleague memory studies, and for scholars working on architecture and and friend, Professor urbanism. His influence as an editor is similarly pronounced, Werner Grilk. The particularly as one of the co-founders of the field-defining New series has featured a set of renowned, international speakers German Critique. We were particularly grateful, then, that he whose lectures, taken together, provide a veritable map of accepted our invitation to deliver the lecture this year. our protean field. The list has become too long to enumerate in detail – though you may peruse it at your leisure on a For this occasion, he drew on his recently published book commemorative plaque on the third floor of the MLB. Past on the importance of short, urban prose by German writers, Grilk Lectures have ranged from Germany’s colonial legacies entitled Miniature Metropolis. In detailed readings of works to musical performance in the Holocaust, to contemporary by Franz Kafka, Siegfried Kracauer and Robert Musil, he made discourses and practices of memory; from literature, to a persuasive case for the centrality of this type of writing to intellectual history, to aesthetic theory and photography; from modernist literature – if not to the very definition of literature 20th century dreams and nightmares to the specter of Capital itself during the early 20th century. Under the impression of haunting neoliberal Europe. rapid urbanization, and confronted with the rise of new media such as photography and film, these authors responded to Professor Andreas Huyssen (Columbia University), who modernity by writing entirely new forms of prose which, delivered the 15th Grilk lecture at the end of October, could as Huyssen’s readings showed, have lost nothing of their have spoken to all of these issues and more - like that of few compelling strangeness. others, his work spans the breadth of German Studies conceived The Futures of the Past: German Cinema and its Media In early June, the department hosted the German Film Institute in the US and abroad came to Ann Arbor for the week-long (GFI). The Institute has had a field-defining function over the meeting, which combined daily morning seminars with three decades (!) since its inception; it has launched research afternoon and evening screenings. Given the participants’ and publication projects, generated networks and boosted broad and interdisciplinary expertise, the seminars invariably careers; it has served consistently as a forum for the exchange generated intense discussions about German film and media of new scholarly and pedagogical ideas. Professors Anton Kaes history, but also about more general questions of pedagogy (Berkeley) and Eric Rentschler (Harvard) have served as the and the changing media landscape. Institute’s directors ever since they co-founded it in the early 1980s. Johannes von Moltke has been serving as its organizer – Featuring over 20 screenings, the Institute presented a unique or, as he likes to think of it, as the Institute’s “producer” – since it opportunity to view a wide variety of films from the entire first came to Ann Arbor in 2004. history of German cinema. A full overview of the program can Johannes von Moltke be found on the institute’s website, https://www.lsa.umich. [email protected] This year marked the fourteenth installment of the biannual edu/german/languageprograms/germanfilminstitute. event. Once again, 25 participants from different institutions www.lsa.umich.edu/german 3 g Department of Germanic Languages & Literatures Department of Germanic Languages & Literatures Facultyds Focus Welcome New Faculty Kristin Dickinson’s research on Kira Thurman is an contemporary German and Turkish assistant professor of literature examines the potential of German and History translation, as both a formal and a (joint appointment) at social medium, in order to intervene the University of Michigan. in nationalist language ideologies and She earned her PhD in nationally structured areas of study. history from the University Her teaching and publications have of Rochester in 2013 under focused on questions of world literature, the direction of Celia translation theory in practice, cross- Applegate, where she linguistic remembrance, linguistic purity, also pursued a minor in and critical monolingualism. musicology through the Eastman School of Music. Her current book project, Translation Her research, which has and the Experience of Modernity: A History of German appeared in German Studies Review and the Journal Turkish Connectivity, traces the development of a of the American Musicological Society (JAMS), focuses German Turkish translational relationship from the on the relationship between race, music, and national early 19th century to the present. Through readings identity in Central Europe. Her article, “Black Venus, of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Sabahattin Ali, White Bayreuth: Race, Sexuality, and the De- Zafer Senocak, and Orhan Pamuk, she examines Politicization of Wagner in Postwar West Germany”