Departmental News

Departmental News

  • Assistant Professor Nicholas Baer has published chapters in two new edited volumes: “An Animated and Animating Medium: On Hegel, Adorno, and the Good of Film,”

    November 30, 2023

    in What Film Is Good For: On the Values of Spectatorship (University of California Press, 2023); and “Relativist Perspectivism: Caligari and the Crisis of Historicism,”
     
    in How Film Histories Were Made: Materials, Methods, Discourses (Amsterdam University Press, 2023).
     

  • The UC Berkeley Department of German and BAMPFA were pleased to host Werner Herzog’s Mosse Lecture

    November 30, 2023

    The UC Berkeley Department of German and BAMPFA were pleased to host Werner Herzog’s Mosse Lecture. The author of more than a dozen books of prose, Herzog read from the long-awaited Every Man for Himself and God Against All: A Memoir (Penguin Random House, October 10, 2023) and engaged in conversation with Deniz Göktürk, Professor of German and Film at UC Berkeley. 
     
    Please click here to access the video
     

  • Former student Scott Shell publishes a new book: The Application of Peircean Semiotics to the Elder Futhark Tradition Establishing Parameters of Magical Communication

    Screen Shot 2023 10 24 at 11.41.55 AM

    October 24, 2023

    This work addresses the issue of magical communication found in the Elder Futhark runic inscriptions. It examines the Kragehul Spear Shaft (DR 196), Björketorp runestone (DR 360), the Horn(s) of Gallehus (DR 12), Gummarp runestone (DR 358), Lindholm amulet (DR 261), Straum whetstone (KJ 50), Ribe skull fragment (DR EM85; 151B), the Noleby runestone (KJ 67), and the Eggja runestone (N KJ 101). It seeks magical communication which may putatively be encompassed by the law of magical semiosis.  By setting objective parameters for measuring this law of magical communication, it can be determined whether or not a particular inscription should…

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  • Alumna Yael Almog, Associate Professor of German at Durham University, wins the GSA/DAAD Best Article Prize (2023):

    October 18, 2023

    GSA article prize | German Studies Association (thegsa.org) The winning article, "Politics and Literary Capital in Tomer Gardi's Broken German"
     

  • Graduate student Qingyang Freya Zhou co-organizes a two-part panel series and presents a paper at the German Studies Association Conference

    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.”

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  • Prof. Kaes publishes a new edition of the Weimar Cinema Website

    Kaes Weimar

    October 6, 2023

    Co-edited with Cynthia Walk of the Sunrise Foundation for the Study of German Cinema and Media, WeimarCinema.org  has become a central online archive and research hub for exploring Weimar film culture. The Fall 2023 edition features a new design and, among other things, a 64-page dossier on the Weimar classic The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.  This website would have been impossible without the work of Computer Science and German double major Ashwin Chugh, who developed the site, and the research help of graduate students Elise Volkmann and Linus Mao.

     

  • Elise Thora Volkmann performs Susanna in Mozart’s Figaros Hochzeit

    Hochzeit

    August 28, 2023

    September 1, 2023: 3rd year PhD student Elise Thora Volkmann recently performed the role of Susanna in Mozart's Figaros Hochzeit. The production premiered in Middlebury, Vermont as part of the Middlebury German for Singer's program and then travelled to Scharbeutz, Germany where Elise performed several additional shows. Photos taken by Bettina Matthias featuring other members of the cast.

  • Sean Lambert publishes film review in Post45 Contemporaries

    August 4, 2023

    4th year PhD student Sean Lambert has published a review of Joachim Trier's The Worst Person in the World in the journal Post45 Contemporaries. The essay appears as part of a cluster of writings on "heteropessimism." Click here for article.
     
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  • Former Graduate student Jon Cho-Polizzi, now Assistant Professor of German (LSA Collegiate Fellow 2022) in the Dept of Germanic Languages and Literatures at the University of Michigan, has two new publications:

    April 15, 2023

    -- an English translation of the best-selling German nonfiction book, Desintegriert euch! by Max Czollek, published in English by Restless Books as De-Integrate: A Jewish Survival Guide for the 21st Century.
     
    -- an English translation of the novel Adas Raum by Sharon Dodua Otoo. The translation was picked up by two different publishers and published in two different editions. Penguin's Riverhead Books in the US published it as Ada's Room and MacLehose Press in the UK and Commonwealth published it as Ada's Realm 
     
    Congratulations, Jon!

  • Graduate Student Lou Silhol-Macher receives a Townsend Dissertation Fellowship for 2023-24 at the Townsend Center for the Humanities.

    February 21, 2023

    Lou is finishing her dissertation titled "Of Goo and Dust: Aesthetic Theories of Formlessness." Congratulations!