News & Events

Conferences & Lectures

Annual Berkeley Interdisciplinary German Studies Conference

The Department of German at Berkeley has been a pioneering force in establishing interdisciplinary German studies. Since 1993, a rotating team of graduate students in the Department has organized the annual Berkeley Interdisciplinary German Studies Conference (BIGSC). In 2019, the 27th edition of this conference is being planned. In a massive collaborative effort, students conceptualize a topic, write and advertise a call for papers, select contributions, compose the program, invite a keynote speaker, raise funds, find a venue, and host about twenty to thirty speakers and guests from the US and abroad. Students find this an exhilarating learning experience to be involved in all aspects of organizing an international conference.  

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Archives of Migration: The Power of Fiction in Times of Fake News

In spring 2021, Professors Deniz Göktürk and Elisabeth Krimmer (University of California, Davis) hosted a series of Zoom conversations with contemporary writers entitled “Archives of Migration: The Power of Fiction in Times of Fake News.” This series, which continues into soring 2022, engages with writers who bring diverse perspectives to questions of societal polarization and the power of poetic imagination, and presents opportunities to experience contemporary literature in action and think about questions of truth in fiction.

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Mosse Lectures

The Mosse-Lectures at Humboldt University in Berlin, founded in 1997, commemorate the history of the Mosse-family, the German-Jewish publishing house Rudolf Mosse, and George L. Mosse – the eminent historian – who gave the series’ opening speech on May 14, 1997. As an academic institution, the Mosse-Lectures continue the tradition of democratic liberalism, which was established and defended by Mosse’s newspaper Berliner Tageblatt, in their commitment to the support of cultural exchange, transfer of knowledge, and political enlightenment. With support from The Mosse Foundation, the Department of German will bring selected Mosse Lectures to Berkeley.

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Semiotic Circle of California & Berkeley Germanic Linguistics Roundtable

The annual meeting of the Semiotic Circle of California and the biennial meeting of the Berkeley Germanic Linguistics Roundtable are multidisciplinary forums for the presentation of semiotic and/or linguistic research by scholars, i.e., students, faculty, independent researchers around the world. The Semiotic Circle, established in 1985, displays well the affability of its discipline through the wide range of topics presented in the humane and natural sciences, whether on language, literature, film, music, medicine, philosophy, among others. Meeting since 1990, the biennial Berkeley Germanic Linguistics Roundtable attracts scholars interested in Germanic Linguistics, its near and/or distant related languages, thus Indo-European and non-Indo-European, synchrony and/or diachrony, historical and/or contemporary language. Diverse approaches, e.g., anthropological, sociological, cognitive, literary, computer, inform the presentations. Articles deriving from both forums are represented in the Interdisciplinary Journal for Germanic Linguistics and Semiotic Analysis.