Peter Loewen

Peter Loewen named dean of Arts and Sciences

Coming from the University of Toronto, where he was the director of the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy, Loewen began his five-year appointment as the Harold Tanner Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences Aug. 1.

A.D White House garden

Rehearsing the Revolution: On Damani Partridge’s “Blackness as a Universal Claim: Holocaust Heritage, Noncitizen Futures, and Black Power in Berlin”

On November 2, Professor Damani Partridge, an eminent scholar in Anthropology, Africana Studies, and German Studies at the University of Michigan and Vice President and President Elect of the German Studies Association, gave a lecture on “Blackness as a Universal Claim: Holocaust Heritage, Noncitizen Futures, and Black Power in Berlin” at Cornell.

Cornell Clock Tower

IGCS Colloquium: Ulrike Vedder

Ulrike Vedder: “Auswandern - Heimkehren - Verschellen: Liminales Erzählen und die Kunst des Handelns in der Auswandererliteratur des 19. Jahrhunderts”

New Directions in German Studies A Symposium by the Graduate Students of German Studies

Symposium: New Directions in German Studies

The goal of this symposium is to provide students from across cohorts an opportunity to present their research, answer questions, and receive feedback on their work. It draws on the expertise of a variety of disciplines such as Romance studies, comparative literature, medieval studies, art history, visual and media studies, cultural studies, intellectual history and philosophy, gender studies, Jewish studies, and more.

Fall 2022 Colloquium Series

Institute for German Cultural Studies Fall 2022 Colloquium Series

Fall 2022 Colloquium Series September 2: Colloquium, Michael Kämper-van den Boogaart (Humboldt University Berlin) October 6 (Thursday): Colloquium, Christian Metz (RWTH Aachen University) October 21: Colloquium, Juan-Jacques Aupiais (Cornell University) November 4: Colloquium, Re’ee Hagay (Cornell University) December 2: Colloquium, Tom Eyers (Duquesne University)

David Dunham

Student Spotlight: David Dunham

After earning an undergraduate degree from New York University, David Dunham, doctoral student in Germanic studies from Springfield, Virginia, chose to pursue further study at Cornell due to the strength of the Germanic studies field and the university’s location in Ithaca.

IGCS Online Colloquium

The final meeting of the Institute for German Cultural Studies Colloquium for this academic year took place on May 8th with a discussion of works in progress by Cornell German Studies’ own Emir Yigit and Jacy Tackett. The former employed a philosophy of the mind framework, drawing upon the work of Immanuel Kant, as well as a number of other German...

photo of Professor Robert Bernasconi at the conference

Representations of Race & Ethnicity in German Modernity

German Studies Graduate Student Conference: "Representations of Race and Ethnicity in German Modernity" (March 6-7, 2020)This conference brought together scholars from numerous disciplines with an interest in critical studies of the concept of race as it has contributed to understandings of the modern subject in the German canon and beyond,...

Erica Weitzman at the colloquium with Patrizia McBride and Paul Fleming to the right

Franz Kafka and the Residues of Realism

On February 7th, Professor Erica Weitzman (Northwestern University) joined our colloquium series with a paper on Franz Kafka’s Das Schloß, which forms part of her forthcoming book, currently entitled At the Limit of the Obscene: German Realism and the Discourse of Matter. The book explores representations of matter and materiality in German-...

Matthias Müller at the colloquium

The Loser’s Edge: Writing from the Vantage Point of the Vanquished

At the IGCS colloquium on January 24th, Cornell PhD candidate Matthias Müller began by questioning the traditional assumption that history is written by the victors through an engagement with historian Reinhart Koselleck’s (1923-2006) thesis that history “may be made by the victors but is in fact written by the vanquished.” By investigating...

screen shot of the IGCS spring 2020 colloquium poster

Institute for German Cultural Studies Spring 2020 Colloquium Series

181 Goldwin Smith Hall, Fridays @ 2:30pmJANUARY 24Matthias Müller (German, Cornell University)The Loser’s Edge: Writing from the Vantage Point of the VanquishedFEBRUARY 7Erica Weitzman (German, Northwestern University)Franz Kafka and the Residues of RealismMARCH 13Tom Eyers (Philosophy & English, Duquesne University)Romantic...

Jens Schröter giving a colloquium

Money and Media Theory

On November 11th, Dr. Jens Schröter (University of Bonn) joined our colloquium series with a paper entitled “Money and Media Theory.” As the title suggests, Professor Schröter’s research brings together theories of money and media, investigating the central question of whether media theory can contribute something to the discussion of money that...

photo of Peter Filkins giving the lecture

H.G. Adler: A life in Many Worlds

On November 5th, Professor Peter Filkins (Bard College at Simon’s Rock) joined us for an insightful lecture on the life and work of H.G. Adler (1910-1988), a survivor of Theresienstadt and Auschwitz who recorded his experiences in both scholarly and literary writing. Despite the extent of Adler’s work, which includes modernist novels, poetry,...

photo of Prof. Markell

The Mob, the People and the Political: Rereading The Origins of Totalitarianism

On October 18th, Professor Patchen Markell (Government, Cornell University) joined our Fall Colloquium Series with a paper entitled “The Mob, the People and the Political: Rereading The Origins of Totalitarianism.” In the essay Markell investigates Arendt’s use of the term “mob” in Origins with specific attention to her treatment of European...

photo of question-and-answer session following the film screening

CowJews and Indians: How Hitler Scared My Relatives - and I Woke Up in an Iroquois Longhouse with a Picture of Jesus, Reminding Me - for the Wrong Reason - That I Owe the Mohawks Rent

Marc Halberstadt’s film begins as an attempt to defamiliarize the question of land ownership in the United States through an analogy with the violent seizure of Jewish property in Germany during the 1930’s. Because Halberstadt’s family lost their home in Nazi Germany before fleeing to the US and settling on Mohawk tribal lands, Halberstadt...

photo of Mark-Georg Dehrmann

Dimensions of the Modern Epic - the Example of Phantasmatic Orality

This semester’s Institute for German Cultural Studies (IGCS) colloquium series opened Friday, September 6th with a discussion of a paper by Mark-Georg Dehrmann (Humboldt University, Berlin) entitled “Dimensions of the Modern Epic – the Example of Phantasmatic Orality.” Taking as its point of departure Hegel’s claim that the epic was dead by the...

Fall 2019 IGCS Colloquium poster image

Institute for German Cultural Studies Fall 2019 Colloquium Series

181 Goldwin Smith Hall, Fridays @ 2:30pm *except November 11SEPTEMBER 6Mark-Georg Dehrmann (Modern German Literature, Humboldt University, Berlin)Dimensions of the Modern Epic. The Example of Phantasmatic OralityOCTOBER 18Patchen Markell (Government, Cornell University)Rereading Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of TotalitarianismMONDAY, NOVEMBER...

Photo of the keynote speaker Brian Richardson

Without Naming It: Pragmatics and Poetics of Pronouns

March 22, 2019On Friday, March 22nd, the German Studies Graduate Student Conference kicked off its first panel by focusing on the philosophical problems involved in using pronouns. The panel featured papers on Hegel by Emir Yigit (Cornell, German), on Kant and Descartes by Søren Larsen (Cornell, German), and on contemporary analytical approaches...

Photo of Rebekka Kricheldorf

2019 Writer in Residence Rebekka Kricheldorf

Masterclass On the afternoon of February 28th, the German writer-in-residence Rebekka Kricheldorf gave a masterclass focusing on her new play Testosterone, which was concurrently having its English-translation première at the Cherry Arts Space in Ithaca. Conducted in German, the masterclass took on the form of a seminar, which allowed for...

Photo of Donatella di Cesare

Heidegger and the Jews

On March 6th, Professor Donatella di Cesare (Universita’ La Sapienza, Rome) gave a talk in the A.D. White House entitled “Heidegger and the Jews,” whose title referenced not only di Cesare’s own book on Heidegger’s Black Notebooks but also Jean-François Lyotard’s important book on Heidegger and “the Jews” from 1988. Di Cesare’s talk centered...

Photo of Barbara Nagel

Goethe’s Stalker Snails

On Friday, May 3rd Prof. Barbara Nagel (Princeton University) closed the IGCS’s Spring Colloquium Series with a paper titled “Goethe’s Stalker Snails.” The paper was part of a larger project that brings together rhetoric, affect theory, and gender and literature, building on Nagel’s previous work about the literalization of language in Der Skandal...

Photo of Uwe Wirth

Reiner Spaß? Komödie als Real-Satire/Pure Fun? Comedy as a Reality Satire

On Friday, April 12, Uwe Wirth (University of Gießen) gave a colloquium presentation on the performative gestures of quotations deployed in the political campaign of the German party “Die Partei” (The Party). This political organization was founded in 2004 by editors of the satirical magazine Titanic and has been led by its former editor-in-chief...

Photo of Eva Horn

Air: For a Cultural History of Climate

On March 8, 2019, Prof. Eva Horn (University of Vienna) joined our Spring Colloquium series with a paper entitled: “Air: For a Cultural History of Climate.” The essay built on work published in Fall 2018 in the journal Grey Room (“Air as Medium”). Starting from her landmark monograph on Zukunft als Katastrosphe (Fischer, 2014), Horn sought to...

photo of Samuel Frederick

Collecting. A Poetics

On November 30, 2018, Professor Samuel Frederick (Penn State University), a graduate of Cornell’s graduate program in German Studies, brought this year’s colloquium series to a close with his talk on “Collecting. A Poetics,” which drew on his current book-project tentatively titled “The Redemption of Things: Collecting as a Poetics in German...

photo of Jette Gindner presenting at the colloquium

Rethinking 1970s Political Modernism: Critical Reflexivity and the Feminization of Labor

On January 25th, 2019, Jette Gindner (Cornell University) opened IGCS’s Spring Colloquium Series with a paper titled: “Rethinking 1970s Political Modernism: Critical Reflexivity and the Feminization of Labor in Tatjana Turanskyj’s Eine Flexible Frau/A flexible Woman (2010).” By using the film by Turanskyj as a case study, Gindner analyzed job...

Photo of David Dunham

Expertise and Authority Conference, Sept. 21-22, 2018

Expertise and Authority Conference: Day OneSeptember 21, 2018On September 21, 2018, Professor Peter Gilgen (Cornell University) opened this year’s collaborative network conference: “Literature, Knowledge, Media,” organized around the theme of expertise and authority, with a talk entitled "Information and the Authority of Poetry.” The...

Photo from the November 2 colloquium

Intermediale Selbstthematisierung

On November 2, 2018, Professor Vance Byrd (Grinnell College) presented a paper titled “Intermediale Selbstthematisierung: Nineteenth-Century Illustrated Periodicals, Panoramas, and Commemoration,” which is based on current research that examines the relations between photography, panorama and war journalism.  In the paper, he focused on the work...

Photo of Matthew Stoltz

Lessing, Novalis, and the Redemption of the Image

On November 16, 2018, as part of the colloquium series of the Institute for German Cultural Studies, Ph.D. candidate Matthew Stoltz (Cornell), presented part of his dissertation project in a paper entitled: “Lessing, Novalis and the Redemption of the Image.” Stoltz, in an illuminating and thoughtful reading, brought to light the multifaceted...

Poster for IGCS Spring 2019 Colloquium Series

Institute for German Cultural Studies Spring 2019 Colloquium Series

181 Goldwin Smith Hall, Fridays @ 2:30pmJANUARY 25Jette Gindner (German, Cornell University)"Rethinking 1970s Political Modernism: Critical Reflexivity and the Feminization of Labor"MARCH 8Eva Horn (Modern German Literature, University of Vienna)"Air: For a Cultural History of Climate"APRIL 12Uwe Wirth (Literature and Cultural Theory,...

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