October 12, 2023

Freya collaborated with Ricky W. Law (Carnegie Mellon University) and Zach Ramon Fitzpatrick (University of Wisconsin–Madison) to curate a two-part panel series titled “Asian Diaspora in the German-Speaking World.” This series brought together seven scholars who explored facets of Asian-German interactions across diverse mediums, including art, film, television, and new media, as well as delving into Asian migration history and activism in Germany. Freya delved deep into the subject with her paper, “Precarious Kinship, Conflicting Memories, and Ambivalent Affects of Belonging in Cho Sung-hyung’s Korean-German Documentaries.”

March 14, 2014

Berkeley Germanic Linguistics Roundtable University of California, Berkeley Invited Speakers: John Ole Askedal, University of Oslo Erhard Hinrichs, University of Tübingen Ekkehard König, University of Freiburg Aditi Lahiri, University of Oxford Anatoly Liberman, University of Minnesota Scholars (faculty and students) concentrating on Germanic Linguistics, its near and/or distant related languages, diverse approaches, synchrony and/or diachrony, historical and/or contemporary language are invited to submit a one-page abstract of a twenty minute paper by January 31, 2014 to the conference organizer: Irmengard Rauch, Department of German Univ. of California, Berkeley; Berkeley, CA 94720-3243 phone/fax (707)746-7480; irauch@berkeley.edu Lodging: Reservations can be made at The…

February 15, 2014

Linguistic Varieties and Variation Interdisciplinary German Studies Conference March 1-2, 2014 at the University of California, Berkeley Werner F. Leopold’s 1959 publication “The Decline of German Dialects” foresaw a grim future for German dialect diversity, positing that “the trend is toward a single colloquial standard over the whole territory.” (Leopold, Werner F. 1959. The Decline of German Dialects. Word 15.) Such claims of widespread dialect leveling in the face of linguistic globalization and standardization are not limited to German, and have persisted in modern literature. Despite this, there is a widening field of literature exploring new varieties of West Germanic, from dialects that mediate between standard and…

January 5, 2014

Semiotic Circle of California TWENTY-NINTH MEETING; JANUARY 25, 2014 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY SEABORG ROOM, FACULTY CLUB *** 9:00 a.m. Michael James Lundell (UC San Diego): "A Source for Richard F. Burton’s Poetry in The 1001 Nights" 9:20 a.m. Ellen McCracken (UC Santa Barbara): "Paratexts as Intratexts: New Systems of Paratextuality in Enhanced E-Books" 9:40 a.m. José Sanjinés (Coastal Carolina Univ.): "'Screens': Communication Systems in the New Media" 10:00 a.m. Kate Carnell Watt (UC Riverside): "Monstrous Transgressors" 10:20 a.m. Eric Savoth (UC Berkeley): "Militarizing Empathy: Bertolt Brecht and the Salvation Army" 10:40 a.m. Winfried Kudszus (UC Berkeley): "Reflections from the…

April 1, 2013

Robert Walser: Intersections of Life and Literature, Art and Psychiatry International conference, April 3, 2013 The singular work and exceptional biography of the Swiss author Robert Walser (1878-1956) have in recent decades attracted the interest of a wide, international readership. During his lifetime, however, Walser lived and wrote at the margins of society. Many of Walser’s most prominent admirers have, therefore, portrayed him as the prototype of the modern writer’s tragic fate. Considering the central importance of writing and psychiatry in his life, Walser’s work and biography invite discussions from perspectives that combine artistic productivity with psychopathology. This conference will…

March 1, 2013

Laughter Interdisciplinary German Studies Conference March 8-10, 2013 With generous support from The Townsend Center for the Humanities, UC Berkeley Graduate Assembly, UC Berkeley Student Opportunities Fund, Department of Comparative Literature, Department of English, Department of Film & Media, Department of German, Department of Philosophy, Program in Medieval Studies, and Department of Spanish & Portuguese. Official Conference Poster Friday, March 8 5:00-6:30 p.m. Welcome Reception (5337 Dwinelle) Remarks: Conference Organizers 6:30-8:00 p.m. Film Screening: Loriot (Selections; 142 Dwinelle) Introduction: Jacob Johnson (UC Berkeley) Presentation: "Es darf gelacht werden" by Dagmar Theison (UC Berkeley) Saturday, March 9 (370 Dwinelle) 10:30 a.m.-12:00 p.m. Ethics…

January 1, 2013

Semiotic Circle of California 2013 TWENTY-EIGHTH MEETING, JANUARY 26, 2013 9:15 a.m. Denise Warren (UC San Diego): "Voice-Over, Interiority and Spectator Address in Film Noir" 9:40 a.m. William Watt (UC Irvine): "Sleight of Hand" 10:05 a.m. Jeroen Dewulf (UC Berkeley): "Pinkster in New York: On the Dutch Community and its Slaves in James Fenimore Cooper’s Novel Satanstoe (1845)" 10:30 a.m. Sang Hwan Seong (Seoul National Univ./ UC  Berkeley): "Phonological Transfer and its Interpretation: L2 Perceptual Acquisition Process of Korean Plosives by German Native  Speakers" 10:55 a.m. Dagmar Theison (UC Berkeley): "The Kafkaesque Process of Translation" 11:20 a.m. Winfried Kudszus (UC…

March 1, 2012

BERKELEY GERMANIC LINGUISTICS ROUNDTABLE Faculty Club, Seaborg Room - University of California, Berkeley *** Friday, March 23, 2012  8:00 a.m. Registration  Morning Session: Marc Pierce, Chair  8:20 a.m. Ann-Marie Swensson and Jürgen Hering (Gothenburg Univ., Sweden): "Stress distinction in prefixed disyllabic noun/verb pairs in English: 'one of the most settled analogies of our language'?" 8:40 a.m. Randall Craig Meister (Brigham Young University): "A Minimalist Approach to German Synthetic Lexical Compounds: A New Look at Thematic Nouns" 9:00 a.m. Sang Hwan Seong (Seoul National University): "German two-way prepositions and L2 acquisition process" 9:20 a.m. Karen Roesch (Texas State University): "Case Loss…

March 1, 2012

The World Elsewhere 20th Annual Interdisciplinary German Studies Conference “For you the city, thus I turn my back: There is a world elsewhere.” – from Coriolanus, Shakespeare Keynote speakers: Professor James A. Schultz (Chair, Department of Germanic Languages, UCLA) and Professor David Shneer (Department of History, University of Colorado) The power of literature is to imagine worlds. From Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Kingdom of Zazamanc to fantastic imaginings of faraway lands in Medieval and Early Modern Cosmographia and from Calvinist cities upon hills to Kafka’s penal colony, literature’s renderings and attempted realizations have fueled the imagination, sparked debate and far too often…

March 1, 2011

The Neighbor How do we identify a neighbor or neighborhood in our current age of migration and mobility? Examining the religious, political, and cultural implications of “the neighbor” in the German-speaking world, this interdisciplinary conference seeks to enrich our understanding of not only genocide and violence but also exchange, aid, and co-operation. The conference will span March 11-13, 2011. We will launch our events on Friday evening with a screening of “Siamo Italiani” (“The Italians”) in Dwinelle 142. This screening will be preceded by a presentation from Jeroen Dewulf, Director of the Dutch Studies program at Berkeley, and it will…