Departmental News

Departmental News

  • On February 9, Jeroen Dewulf will participate at the conference on “Spirited Arts” at Yale University, where on February 12, he will also give a lecture on the topic “In Search of the ‘Lingua Franca’ of Manhattan’s First Enslaved African Community” at the center for Early Modern Studies.

    February 5, 2024

  • German Department Graduate Student, Kayla van Kooten, featured in Arts & Humanities article on upcoming conference on Language and AI

    January 24, 2024

    Together with Kimberly Vinall and Emily Hellmich from the Berkeley Language Center, German Department graduate student Kayla van Kooten discusses the importance of the languages and the humanities in the future of AI ahead of upcoming conference. The Berkeley Language Center Presents:
     
    Language & AI: Generating Interdisciplinary Connections and Possibilities
     
    February 28, 2024 1-5:15 PM Room 310, Banatao Auditorium, Sutardja Dai Hall

  • German Graduate student featured in discussion of AI and language

    January 24, 2024

    Click here for more information.

  • Professor Nick Baer published the chapter “Die Gerüchte sind wahr. Über Klatsch und Tratsch in Murnaus Filmen”

    January 19, 2024

    in the new "Film-Konzepte" volume on Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau (edition text+kritik, 2024).

  • Prof Jeroen Dewulf’s book, Afro-Atlantic Catholics: America’s First Black Christians, awarded 2023 John Gilmary Shea Prize

    January 5, 2024

    Jeroen Dewulf's latest book, Afro-Atlantic Catholics: America's First Black Christians (Notre Dame UP, 2022), was awarded the 2023 John Gilmary Shea Prize by the American Catholic Historical Association. The Shea Prize honors a book that has made the most “original and distinguished contribution” to the history of the Catholic Church. 
     
    For more information click here .

  • Former graduate student Priscilla Layne gives a TedxTalk at Bergamo, Italy, on The Power of Books: Crafting Identity and Empathy through Literature

    December 18, 2023

    Priscilla Layne, author of White Rebels in Black: German Appropriation of Black Popular Culture (2018), is Professor of German and Director for the Center of European Studies at the University of North Carolina. The link to her talk is here.

  • Graduate student Qingyang Freya Zhou is awarded the 2023 Coalition of Women in German (WiG) Best Article Prize.

    December 18, 2023

    Congratulations, Freya!   Here's the laudatio: "Qingyang Freya Zhou's illuminating article, 'Queering the Screen: Spectral Figures and German-Taiwanese Encounters in Monika Treut’s Ghosted,' which appeared in Seminar: A Journal of Germanic Studies, 58.3 (2022): 251-270, adroitly connects Terry Castle’s notion of the 'apparitional lesbian' with Chinese beliefs about ghosts".                    

    Read more
  • Assistant Professor Nicholas Baer has published chapters in two new edited volumes: “An Animated and Animating Medium: On Hegel, Adorno, and the Good of Film,”

    November 30, 2023

    in What Film Is Good For: On the Values of Spectatorship (University of California Press, 2023); and “Relativist Perspectivism: Caligari and the Crisis of Historicism,”
     
    in How Film Histories Were Made: Materials, Methods, Discourses (Amsterdam University Press, 2023).
     

  • The UC Berkeley Department of German and BAMPFA were pleased to host Werner Herzog’s Mosse Lecture

    November 30, 2023

    The UC Berkeley Department of German and BAMPFA were pleased to host Werner Herzog’s Mosse Lecture. The author of more than a dozen books of prose, Herzog read from the long-awaited Every Man for Himself and God Against All: A Memoir (Penguin Random House, October 10, 2023) and engaged in conversation with Deniz Göktürk, Professor of German and Film at UC Berkeley. 
     
    Please click here to access the video
     

  • Former student Scott Shell publishes a new book: The Application of Peircean Semiotics to the Elder Futhark Tradition Establishing Parameters of Magical Communication

    October 24, 2023

    This work addresses the issue of magical communication found in the Elder Futhark runic inscriptions. It examines the Kragehul Spear Shaft (DR 196), Björketorp runestone (DR 360), the Horn(s) of Gallehus (DR 12), Gummarp runestone (DR 358), Lindholm amulet (DR 261), Straum whetstone (KJ 50), Ribe skull fragment (DR EM85; 151B), the Noleby runestone (KJ 67), and the Eggja runestone (N KJ 101). It seeks magical communication which may putatively be encompassed by the law of magical semiosis.  By setting objective parameters for measuring this law of magical communication, it can be determined whether or not a particular inscription should…

    Read more