News & Events
Events
The Department of German hosts and co-sponsors a range of events throughout the year, including conferences, lecture series, and weekly/biweekly colloquia and social activities.
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30th Berkeley Annual Interdisciplinary German Studies Conference
Time: - 1:00 PMDate: - 02/26/2022
Arrested Mobilities: Stillness, Power and Modernity The German Department’s annual graduate conference will take place on Zoom Friday, Feb. 25th (8am-1pm) and Saturday, Feb. 26th (8am-1:45pm). The topic is “Arrested Mobilities: Stillness, Power and Modernity”. We have a small in-person reception planned on Friday at 4:30pm in Dwinelle 370 for anyone who’s interested in discussing the conference while enjoying light refreshments. As early as the 1920’s, Robert Musil remarked on the enormous effort it takes to stand still in a world that demands constant motion. Reflecting on the zooming street he sees through his window, the protagonist of Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften comments: “Könnte…
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Unreadable Archives: Zafer Şenocak in Conversation with Deniz Göktürk, Kristin Dickinson, and Participants of the Seminar on “Archival Resistance”
Time: - 1:30 PMDate: Location: Zoom
Speaker: Zafer Şenocak
Reading – Literary | April 2 | 12-1:30 p.m. | Zoom Featured Performer: Zafer Şenocak Panelist/Discussants: Kristin Dickinson; Deniz Göktürk, University of California, Berkeley Sponsors: Institute of European Studies, Department of German, Center for German and European Studies, German Consulate General San Francisco, Pacific Regional Office of the German Historical Institute Washington, German Program, University of California, Davis This event is the second in a series of workshop conversations with authors, “Archives of Migration: The Power of Fiction in Times of Fake News” organized by Deniz Göktürk (UC Berkeley, Department of German, Multicultural Germany Project and Transit Journal) and Elisabeth Krimmer (UC Davis, German Department, Migration and Aesthetics Project). The…
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“‘At the Limit of the Obscene’: German Realism and the Disgrace of Matter”
Time: - 4:30 PMDate: Location: https://berkeley.zoom.us/j/93239203888
Speaker: Erica Weitzman (Northwestern University)
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BIG GIVE
Time: - 11:00 PMDate:
Big Give, our annual fundraising blitz, has been online since 2014 — including last year’s event, which took place March 2020, at the moment life changed around the world. On Thursday, March 11, 2021, we invite the Cal community to rally in a special Big Give for the continued excellence and influence of UC Berkeley’s global solutions, peerless students, and life-changing research. Please donate to the Department of German.
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Layers of Untold Stories: Sharon Dodua Otoo in Conversation with Translator Jon Cho-Polizzi and Deniz Göktürk
Time: - 1:30 PMDate: Location: Zoom
Speaker: Sharon Dodua Otoo
Reading – Literary | March 5 | 12-1:30 p.m. | Zoom Registration Featured Performer: Sharon Dodua Otoo Panelist/Discussants: Jon Cho-Polizzi; Deniz Göktürk This event is the first in a series of workshop conversations with authors, “Archives of Migration: The Power of Fiction in Times of Fake News” organized by Deniz Göktürk (UC Berkeley, Department of German, Multicultural Germany Project and Transit Journal) and Elisabeth Krimmer (UC Davis, German Department, Migration and Aesthetics Project). The series engages in conversation with contemporary writers who bring diverse perspectives to questions of societal polarization and the power of poetic imagination. Their work in German resonates with readers around…
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Layers of Untold Stories: Sharon Dodua Otoo in Conversation with Translator Jon Cho-Polizzi and Deniz Göktürk
Time: - 1:30 PMDate:
Speaker: Sharon Dodua Otoo
Reading – Literary | March 5 | 12-1:30 p.m. | Featured Performer: Sharon Dodua Otoo Panelist/Discussants: Jon Cho-Polizzi; Deniz Göktürk Attended by more than a hundred participants across the globe, this Zoom event was the first in a series of workshop conversations with authors, “Archives of Migration: The Power of Fiction in Times of Fake News” organized by Deniz Göktürk (UC Berkeley, Department of German, Multicultural Germany Project and Transit Journal) and Elisabeth Krimmer (UC Davis, German Department, Migration and Aesthetics Project). The series engages in conversation with contemporary writers who bring diverse perspectives to questions of societal polarization and the power of poetic imagination. Their…
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29th Annual Berkeley Interdisciplinary German Studies Conference: “Traveling Forms: Global German Studies”
Time: - 5:00 PMDate: - 02/21/2021 Location: Zoom-Workshop
Speaker: TBA
Travel Forms-Global German Studies Program As a pandemic and international solidarity for Black Lives Matter demand reckoning with crises of a global scale, we propose to rethink German Studies in its constitutive contradiction: formed around a national canon, yet also situated in global networks, the discipline calls for conceptual, aesthetic, and historical reevaluations of cultural-medial forms in motion. Around 1800, Immanuel Kant conceptualized cosmopolitanism without leaving Königsberg, and the decreasingly mobile Goethe projected the idea of world literature from his study in Weimar, suggesting that visions of global circulation often arise in tension with local limitations on mobility. In this…
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Lecture: “Close Reading Distant Viewing”
Time: - 3:30 PMDate: Location: Zoom link: https://berkeley.zoom.us/j/94310825987
Speaker: Professor Fabian Offert (History and Theory of Digital Humanities Department of Germanic and Slavic Studies University of California, Santa Barbara)
Machine learning has not only changed how computers “read”, but also how they process the visual world. In this talk, I will investigate some of the implications of the machine learning revolution for the digital humanities. I will present an analysis of popular distant viewing practices that leverage machine learning to analyze large corpora of images and show how these practices fail by failing to take into account the radical differences between human and machine intelligence. Specifically, I will argue that it is exactly a “close reading” of machine learning that is required to uncover such epistemological limitations, and that…
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“Close Reading Distant Viewing”
Time: - 3:30 PMDate: Location: Zoom link: https://berkeley.zoom.us/j/94310825987
Speaker: Professor Fabian Offert (History and Theory of Digital Humanities Department of Germanic Studies and Slavic Studies University of California, Santa Barbara)
Machine learning has not only changed how computers “read”, but also how they process the visual world. In this talk, I will investigate some of the implications of the machine learning revolution for the digital humanities. I will present an analysis of popular distant viewing practices that leverage machine learning to analyze large corpora of images and show how these practices fail by failing to take into account the radical differences between human and machine intelligence. Specifically, I will argue that it is exactly a “close reading” of machine learning that is required to uncover such epistemological limitations, and that…
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“The Madhouse: Ecological Anxiety and Viral Reality in Kafka and Coetzee”
Time: - 7:00 PMDate: Location: Zoom link: https://berkeley.zoom.us/j/99282379874
Speaker: Professor Ian Fleishman (University of Pennsylvania)
The German department is proud to present: “The Madhouse: Ecological Anxiety and Viral Reality in Kafka and Coetzee” Prof. Ian Fleishman German and Cinema & Media Studies University of Pennsylvania