Graduate Faculty News:

Frederick Amrine gave numerous talks on Goethe, on Rudolf Steiner, and on Youth Movements from the 19th to the 21st centuries in the past year. These lectures took him to Greece, Turkey, and Canada, as well as Pittsburgh, Seattle, and a number of talks right here in Ann Arbor. He will be returning to Athens and Istanbul for repeat engagements this coming summer. Recent publications include ongoing translations and editorial contributions to the Collected Works of Rudolf Steiner, as well as forthcoming publications on  “The Music of the Organism: Uexküll, Zuckerkandl, Merleau-Ponty, and Deleuze as Goethean Ecologists in Search of a New Paradigm” (forthcoming in a special issue of The Goethe Yearbook devoted to Goethe and ecology); “‘The Magic Formula We All Seek’: Spinoza + Fichte = x” (forthcoming in At the Edges of Thought: Deleuze and Post-Kantian Philosophy, ed. Daniela Voss and Craig Lundy.  Edinburgh University Press); and “Goethe as Mystagogue” (forthcoming in The Goethe Yearbook)

Kerstin Barndt has been invited to deliver the keynote address for a graduate student conference at Indiana University this February, where she will talk on “Layers of Time. Tropes of Stratification in Contemporary Museum Culture.”
Together with Carla Sinopoli, Professor Barndt has also submitted a research grant and book proposal to investigate the history of scientific collections at the University of Michigan. The results of this project will be presented during the University’s bicentennial celebrations in 2017.

Geoff Eley’s coedited volume, German Colonialism in a Global Age, ed. with Bradley D. Naranch, is out from Duke University Press. It also contains an article by our colleague George Steinmetz. In late June and early July 2014 he visited at the University of Bielefeld for two weeks giving some talks and seminars.

Peter McIsaac spoke on “Kulturwissenschaftliche Überlegungen zu populären anatomischen Ausstellungen” at the meeting of the Arbeitskreis Moulagen at the Deutsches Hygiene-Museum Dresden this past November. At the 2015 MLA convention in Vancouver, he was the respondent on the panel, “Interrogating the Contemporary: Present Pasts,” organized by the Division on 20th-Century German Literature.
Here at Michigan, Professor McIsaac’s digital humanities project on mainstream German periodicals was one of five selected to be part of a larger study on “The Science of Data Science,” (PI: Carl Lagoze, UMSI). This project, which is funded by the Alfred P. Sloan and the Gordon and Betty Moore foundations and made available through the Mcubed Diamond Program, aims to study groundbreaking data-driven and interdisciplinary research projects.

Robin Queen’s new book, Vox Popular: The Surprising Life of Language in the Media just appeared in print from Wiley-Blackwell (2015). Congratulations!

Johannes von Moltke gave presentations on Siegfried Kracauer as a “Curious Humanist” at the Université de Montréal and the University of Chicago this past November. In March, he will contribute to a panel on “Totalitarian Communication and the Critical Theory of Propaganda” at the annual conference of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies, before heading to New York for a conference on “Transatlantic Theory Transfer: Missed Encounters?” where he will speak on the American reception of Siegfried Kracauer. This coming May, Professor von Moltke will once again host the German Film Institute at UM, which will again be directed by Anton Kaes (Berkeley) and Eric Rentschler (Harvard). This year’s theme is “The Futures of the Past: German Cinema and Its Media.”

Lecturer News:

Kalli Federhofer chaired a panel on "Soccer: New Goals for the Curriculum" at ACTFL (American Council on Teaching of Foreign Languages) in San Antonio last November.
Earlier last year, he also provided a "Professional Development Night" on soccer to high school teachers and professors at AP Reading in Cincinnati.
Here at Michigan, he was awarded a Professional Development Grant from CRLT, was reappointed as member of the LSA curriculum committee, and joined a new committee on individualized majors for undergraduates.

Mary Gell was also awarded a grant from the Lecturers' Professional Development Fund to attend an intensive 4-day creative writing workshop this summer in Rhinebeck, New York called "Writing the Unthinkable" with famed cartoonist, author and University of Wisconsin professor Lynda Barry.

Mary Rodena-Krasan has been awarded a Level II ITC grant for the preliminary development of a foreign language video game. With the help of an Abrahms Sustainability Fellowship, she has also iImplemented a section on water in her “Germany and the Environment” course. For last Fall, she created, designed and taught a new 300 level course in the Fall entitled “Peace, Love & Rock 'n Roll: Germany's Student Movement and the Generation that Changed a Nation.” She is currently working on an article tentatively entitled "Postcolonialism, Transnationalism, and the Space Between."

Graduate Student News:

Mary Hennessy will present a paper on Fassbinder’s Martha at the ACLA this March, and in April she will participate in a graduate student conference on Gesture, Affect, and Embodiment on Screen at the University of Chicago.

Hannah McMurray was selected to participate in a workshop at the Humanities Without Walls Consortium in Chicago this summer as a predoctoral fellow. Meghan Forbes, a student in our graduate certificate program, will likewise participate.

Naomi Vaughan willl be presenting a paper titled "In Darkness: The Bunker as Barrier in Narrative and Architecture" at Berkeley's Graduate Student Conference "Barriers: Confronting Obstacles in Language, Media, Politics and Culture" at the end of February.