Kerstin Barndt is in the final stages of co-editing Objects of Knowledge. Museums, Collections and Libraries at the University of Michigan. The catalogue will be published in 2017 by University of Michigan Press. On February 26th, Barndt presented an invited lecture at Vanderbilt University on the German Historical Museum, Berlin's Neues Museum, and the Ruhrmuseum in Essen. Her talk was entitled "Show Time. Museums, Memory and the Poetics of History in Contemporary Germany." In March, Barndt will join U-M faculty from Romance Languages, Slavic and English for a panel discussion on European Avant-Garde studies.

 

Kristin Dickinson is editing a special section for the journal Türkisch-deutsche Studien Jahrbuch entitled "Transnational Perspectives on the Life and Work of Sabahattin Ali" (forthcoming).

 

Andreas Gailus recently presented a talk at Cornell University entitled “Brains: Forms of Life in German Modernism.” The talk is part of his current book manuscript on the discourse of vitalism

in German literature and philosophy from the late 18th to the mid 20th century. In March, we will have an opportunity to discuss this paper and the mansucript with Professor Gailus in the German Studies Colloquium.

 

Julia Hell has been invited to share her current research with members of the research project on the Bible, Antiquity, and Political Thought in the Nineteenth-Century at the Center for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (University of Cambridge).  On March 9, Hell will discuss a chapter from her manuscript (Falling: Imperial Ruin Gazers, from Polybius to Hitler) in a workshop. The chapter’s title is: “Imagining a ‘future that is already the past’: Oswald Spengler on post-Roman imperialism, Caesarism, and Paul’s katechontic endtime scenario.” On March 10, she will present a paper at the conference on The Bible and Antiquity in Nineteenth-century Political Thinking on 10 March. The title of the conference paper is: “In the ruins of Tipasa: Louis Bertrand's theological politics of empire.”

 

Peter M. McIsaac will present “Besucherumgebung und medialer Kontext als performative Faktoren bei der Wahrnehmung von anatomischen Zurschaustellungen zwischen 1890-1930“ at the international conference „Naturgetreue Objekte: Moulagen und Modelle im Spannungsfeld von Wissenschaft und Ästhetik,“ held March 4-5, 2016 at the Medizinisches Museum, Hamburg.

On March 9, 2016, McIsaac will present „Die geowissenschaftliche Analyse von großen Mengen historischer Texte: Die Visualisierung geographischer Verhältnisse in deutschen Familienzeitschriften“ at the 2016 conference of the digital humanities im deutschsprachigen Raum in Leipzig.

McIsaac has also been invited to lecture on and lead a tour of the exhibition „House of Wax: Anatomical, Pathological, and Ethnographic Waxworks from Castan’s Panopticum, Berlin, 1869-1922” on April 5, 2016 in Brooklyn, NY. In the fall, he will be presenting his work on anatomical wax exhibition at the GSA seminar, “Material Culture and Its Discontents,” from Sept 28-Oct 1, 2016 in San Diego, CA. He also co-edited Exhibiting the German Past.

 

Helmut Puff has been awarded a Honorary Fellowship at the Historisches Kolleg in Munich, Germany (October 2016-February 2017). A volume he co-edited with Ulrike Strasser and Christopher Wild -- Cultures of Communication: Theologies of Media in Early Modern Europe and Beyond -- is about to appear with University of Toronto Press.

 

Kira Thurman is the new co-organizer of the Music and Sound Studies Network of the German Studies Association along with David Imhoof. She helped to organize three panels on music and sound studies for the 2016 GSA in San Diego.

Kira was a recent invited speaker at the University of Illinois for a symposium on world music recordings and the global midwest. Her talk was entitled "Are they African or American? German Reception of African American Spirituals, 1870-1930."

 

Johannes von Moltke has co-organized a conference at the IFK in Vienna for the 50th anniversary of Siegfried Kracauer’s death. He will be presenting a paper entitled “Der wunderliche Humanist: Siegfried Kracauer in der Kultur des kalten Kriegs,” and has been invited to appear on Austrian radio during his visit for a conversation about Kracauer and the conference. His own book on Kracauer is due out in June from the University of California Press. His most recent article, entitled “Hollywood, Hitler, and Historiography: Film History as Cultural Critique,” appears in the Fall 2015 issue of Cultural Critique.

 

Hot off the press: Our Ancient Wars: Rethinking War Through the Classics, jointly edited by Victor Caston and Silke Weineck, who, respectively, also wrote the introduction and the epilogue.

 

 

Lecturer News

 

Kalli Federhofer and María Dorantes (RLL) received the Gilbert Whitaker Grant for the online version of the Modern Language Aptitude Test. Federhofer was also appointed by the AATG President as a member in the German for Professional Purposes Committee for the next three years. It focuses on the study of Fachdeutsch and the integration of Business, technology, science, and engineering in German instruction in the US. At the ACTFL in San Diego this past November, Kalli led the session Using Data and Social Media to Transform Student Recruitment and Retention.