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Departmental News

News

  • Professor Hinrich Seeba delivers lecture on “Geselligkeit: Bildungskultur und bürgerliche Emanzipation”

    March 13, 2015

    After a successful compact seminar on Heinrich von Kleist came to a close last Friday, UC Berkeley Professor Emeritus Hinrich Seeba delivered an illuminating lecture on “Geselligkeit: Bildungskultur und bürgerliche Emanzipation”: “Einem Emeritus, der immer mehr außerhalb der Gelehrsamkeit und zwischen den Kulturen lebt, ist hoffentlich nachzusehen, daß ich bei den folgenden Überlegungen, die ich in erweiterter Fassung zuerst vor dem großen Kreis des Naturwissenschaftlich-Historischen Vereins in Detmold vorgetragen habe, nicht intensiv, sondern extensiv, nicht begriffs-deduktiv, sondern erfahrungs-induktiv vorgegangen bin. Ich wollte meinem deutschen Publikum, das man im altmodischen Sinn getrost ‚gebildet‘ nennen darf, eine historische und kritische Perspektive auf…

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  • Barriers’ Special Guest Speaker: Claire Kramsch

    March 4, 2015

    Special Guest Speaker Professor Claire Kramsch delivered an illuminating lecture at the 2015 German Studies Conference Barriers entitled: “Discipline and Punish in the Language Classroom. Does Foucault Still Hold Today?”: “In Discipline & Punish, Foucault compares the modes of punishment in pre-modern and modern times for the transgression of political/religious rule in the 16th century, the infringement of juridical laws in the 17th and the violation of societal norms in the 18th. Rule, law and norm were so many barriers that both facilitated and impeded the proper functioning of society and the construction of the good citizen. While the punishment…

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  • Barriers Conference

    March 2, 2015

    This past weekend marked the 23rd annual Interdisciplinary German Studies Conference. This year’s topic, Barriers, attracted a diverse crowd of scholars from across the globe, including speakers from Egypt, Russia, Slovakia, Germany, Austria, the UK, Ireland, Canada and the United States. Topics ranged from the theoretical to the concrete, from contemporary European migration to medieval depictions of race relations and war. Through the media of literature, film, language and material culture, conference attendees challenged us to reimagine barriers as catalysts for social and political change, examining the role of theory and scholarship for evoking real transformation in an increasingly globalized…

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  • Niklaus Largier receives Anneliese Maier Research Award

    January 28, 2015

    Professor Niklaus Largier has been one of eleven scholars selected by the Alexander von Humboldt-Foundation for the Anneliese Maier Research Award. This award is granted to humanities scholars and social scientists for a five-year research collaboration with a host institution in Germany. Professor Largier will be working with the University of Cologne’s Department of German Language and Literature 1 in researching the dimensions of the possible.

  • Catalog of Everything And Other Stories

    January 23, 2015

    Professor Jeroen Dewulf, along with a group of undergraduate students in his course, has published the book Catalog of Everything And Other Stories, a selection of translated texts by Swiss author Peter K. Wehrli. An interview with the author about the new publication can be found here.

  • Annual Poetry Party

    December 4, 2014

    Please save the date for our Annual Poetry Party, hosted by the Department of German and Dutch Studies, to bring us together as a community before the close of this year: Thursday, December 11th, 3:00pm-5:30pm (RRR-week), in 370 Dwinelle Hall We will have Weihnachtsplätzchen, Kaffee, Tee, Glühwein, and other light refreshments. If you would like to bake for us to complement what we offer, please let us know! You are encouraged to share poems and songs, written by others or written by you, in German (all dialects welcome), Dutch, and Yiddish. If you would like to share a poem, or…

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  • Jeroen Dewulf distinguished with Hendricks Award

    November 19, 2014

    Jeroen Dewulf was distinguished with the annual Hendricks Award by the New Netherland Institute for his research project on the early Dutch history of New York and the first slave community on Manhattan.

  • The Berkeley Prize for Undergraduate Essays in German Studies

    September 24, 2014

    The Berkeley Undergraduate Essay Prize is awarded annually by the Department of German for outstanding unpublished papers written during the previous calendar year by undergraduate students enrolled at a North American university/college. Thus the 2015 prize will consider papers written during 2014 on a broad range of topics in German studies. The winning essays carry a cash award of $500 each and will be considered for publication in the department’s electronic journal TRANSIT. Essays for submission may be written in German or in English; one submission per student. They should be double-spaced, between 3000 and 5000 words in length (including…

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  • Dewulf to Direct Institute for European Studies

    May 30, 2014

    The new director of the Institute for European Studies will hail from our department.

    Professor Jeroen Dewulf has accepted this position and will be starting in August, while maintaining his active presence in the Dutch and German programs.

    We look forward to good collaborations with a revitalized Institute that will promote discussions on Europe in the world with an emphasis on cultural studies and language learning.

  • PhD Candidate Accepts Position at Butler

    May 15, 2014

    PhD Candidate Melissa Etzler has accepted a position as Instructor of German at Butler University.