April 1, 2014

Professor Burkhardt Wolf (Berlin/Santa Barbara) will give a talk titled "Compasso. Poetic orientation in modernity's 'grand sea of being'" from 4-6 p.m. in Dwinelle 282. ABSTRACT For centuries, perhaps since the emergence of poetry itself, Western culture has engaged in the project of "writing the sea," or hydrography, and within this project the compass has played a fundamental role. The talk serves as a brief introduction into the cultural history of the compass and shows how, ever since its first use, the compass has guided specific techniques of writing and notation and has been both poetically and epistemically productive. It…

April 1, 2014

Ulrich Tiedau will lead a workshop on "Text- and Sentiment-Mining for Historical Cultural Enquiry" from 2-4 p.m. in Dwinelle 282. The workshop will discuss the promises and challenges of 'big data' and digital methods for historical and cultural enquiry. Text mining and sentiment mining open up the perspective of a quantitative approach to the history of mentalities, allowing researchers to discover long-term developments and turning points in public debates, as well as to map vectors of cross-cultural influences. Examples will be drawn from the Asymmetrical Encounters project (2013–16), which tries to answer the question how during the 19th and 20th centuries…

March 1, 2014

Ursula Renate Riedner (Herder Institut, Universität Leipzig) will give a lecture on "Literarizität und Sprachaneignung im Kontext von Deutsch als Fremd- und Zweitsprache."

February 1, 2014

Visiting Professor Thomas Weitin (Konstanz University) will lecture on "The Devil is in Human Dignity: Goethe’s Faust."

February 1, 2014

Steven Aschheim (Hebrew University, Jerusalem) will give a lecture on "An Unwritten Letter from Victor Klemperer to Hannah Arendt & Gershom Scholem."

October 1, 2013

Aleida Assmann (Konstanz) will present a lecture titled "From Collective Violence to a Common Future: Four Models for Dealing with a Traumatic Past." Since the end of the Second World War, we have witnessed different memory policies in dealing with a traumatic past. The first, "dialogic forgetting," a very old policy dating back to antiquity, was practiced especially after civil wars. The opposite form, "perpetual culture of remembrance," is a historical novelty that took center stage only four decades after the Holocaust. A third model was introduced in the early 1990s with the Truth and Reconciliation commissions in South Africa, following the…

October 1, 2013

Eva Geulen (Goethe Universität Frankfurt/Main) will give a lecture on "Metamorphoses of Metamorphosis: Goethe’s Morphology and Its Reception."

October 1, 2013

Professor Inka Mülder-Bach (Munich) will give a lecture titled "Musils Mann ohne Eigenschaften: Der Fall Moosbrugger."

September 1, 2013

Screenwriter Oliver Schütte will lecture on "Writing Against the Movies: The Berlin School as (Anti-) Auteur Cinema."

September 1, 2013

Guest Lecture by Ralph Samuel for German 4 classes: "Kindertransport to England to escape the Holocaust."