March 7, 2016

Emina Mušanović has accepted a position as Assistant Professor of German at Linfield College. Congratulations, Emina!

March 4, 2016

The 24th Interdisciplinary German Studies Conference “Focus in Distraction” was a great success. For a full schedule of the conference, please see the events calendar. A warm thanks to all the conference participants and the conference organizers Jarrett Dury-Agri, Ken Fockele, and Greg Smith.  

February 5, 2016

“Aesthetic Possibilities: Literature, Rhetoric, Philosophy” – Berkeley-Köln Summer School The Berkeley-Köln Summer School, established by the Anneliese Maier prize, offers graduate students the opportunity for intensive discussions focussed on aesthetics, rhetoric, and literary criticism with an international team of professors from Philosophy, Cultural Studies, Literary Studies, and Media Studies. The goal is to work cooperatively on theoretical questions beyond disciplinary boundaries. The five-day summer school will alternate between the Universität zu Köln and UC Berkeley for five years. In the mornings there will be a seminar directed by one of the experts, in the afternoons there will be project presentations by participants. The discussion will be based on…

November 9, 2015

Big Give, Berkeley’s 24-hour fundraising blitz, is back – and bigger than ever! Just as the Cal community consistently reaches higher, aims farther, and imagines a better world beyond our own needs, the second annual Big Give is thinking even bigger: your gift of any amount this year makes an even bigger impact on students.

Mark your calendar! Visit the Give to German link on the department homepage to contribute any amount. Together we will continue to dream bigger and do better – keeping Berkeley the No. 1 public university in the world.

September 27, 2015

Semiotic Circle of California
Saturday, January 23, 2016

Call for Papers

The Thirty-First Meeting of the Semiotic Circle of California will be held in the Faculty Club of the University of California, Berkeley on Saturday, January 23, 2016. Please submit this form together with a one paragraph abstract (attachment or CD) by December 15, 2015 for participation in the meeting. As customary, the meeting will be an open topic research paper meeting. Reservations for housing may be made directly to the Faculty Club at (510) 642-1993/540-5678 or to the Hotel Durant at (510) 845-8981.

September 11, 2015

The German Department at Berkeley welcomes this year’s Max Kade Distinguished Visiting Professor, Professor Helmuth Lethen (IFK, Vienna). Professor Lethen is offering a compact seminar entitled “Brecht’s Hauspostille.” He will also participate in Prof. Kaes’ seminar on the Avant-garde throughout September. Professor Lethen will give a public lecture on “Der Schatten des Fotografen” on September 18, 4-6 pm.

September 2, 2015

The upcoming conference sponsored by the German Department aims to explore Freud’s place in current debates on secularism and post-secularism, featuring new research on the intersections of theology, Judaism and history in Freud’s psychoanalytic theories. Freud’s own attempts to suggest a new paradigm for thinking the religious, beginning with the place of monotheism and Judaism in his theories, will be brought into more general debates on the place of the secular in Jewish thought and in psychoanalysis. The conference will bring together established scholars not only in psychology, religion and Jewish studies but also philosophy, history and literary studies. The…

August 17, 2015

Call for Papers: Berkeley Germanic Linguistics Roundtable Friday/Saturday, April 1-2, 2016 The Faculty Club University of California, Berkeley Invited Speakers: David Bamman, University of California, Berkeley Frans Plank, University of Konstanz Henning Reetz, University of Frankfurt Theo Vennemann, University of Munich Joseph Voyles, University of Washington Scholars (faculty and students) interested in Germanic Linguistics, its near and/or distant related languages, diverse approaches, synchrony and/or diachrony, historical and/or contemporary language are invited to submit a one-page abstract of a twenty minute paper by January 31, 2016 to the conference organizer: Irmengard Rauch, Department of German Univ. of California, Berkeley; Berkeley, CA…

August 4, 2015

Professor Jeroen Dewulf has received the Clague and Carol Van Slyke Article Prize for 2014, awarded by the New Netherland Institute, for his article entitled “Emulating a Portuguese Model: The Slave Policy of the West India Company and the Dutch Reformed Church in Dutch Brazil (1630-1654) and New Netherland (1614-1664) in Comparative Perspective”, which appeared in the Journal of Early American History.

May 26, 2015

Doctoral candidate Erik Born was interviewed by the Österreichischer Rundfunk about his dissertation research on wireless technology. The interview can be found here.