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Jocelyn Holland’s paper is part of a larger project whose aim is to explore how material techniques and craftmanship, and the qualities of physical materials, shape language and thought. The paper focuses on metaphors derived from techniques of placement and joining. While common examples such as “dovetailing” do a good job of illustrating how technological…
Annetta Alexandridis, classical archaeologist and art historian in Cornell’s College of Arts and Sciences, died April 13. Known for her hands-on approach, she was associate director of the Harvard-Cornell Exploration of Ancient Sardis, Türkiye and co-curated the Cornell Plaster Cast Collection.
Willner’s paper examines the biological speculation that Sigmund Freud and his Hungarian disciple Sándor Ferenczi jointly developed between 1913 and 1924 and referred to as “bioanalysis.” During the years surrounding the First World War, they inscribed trauma, regression, death, neurosis, hysteria, Nachträglichkeit, and repetition compulsion into a broad spectrum of biological concepts that had been…
Katrin Lehnen's paper conceptualizes writing as a cultural and social practice and examines how writing practices are transformed in postdigital contexts. Drawing on praxeological theory, writing is understood as a socially typified form of action embedded in cultural norms, material settings, and implicit knowledge. Using an example from early literacy acquisition, the paper illustrates how…
Reading Records, Hearing Poems: Enzensberger Meets Max Roach on Berendt’s ’62 LP Montage
The paper is part of a larger project that examines Erwin Piscator’s three stagings of Nathan der Weise (1942, 1944, 1952) to argue that the Enlightenment drama, in Piscator’s hands, functioned as a form of political action rather than mere artistic representation. By tracing how the same play was redeployed across wartime America and postwar…
“Rilke’s Re-positions (Umstellungen)” is the fourth chapter of my book, Democracy’s Medium: Poems Critique the Rule of the People in Peru and Germany. This book is an exercise in democratic conversation that I carry out with the reader, with the aims of revisiting the concept of democracy from the basis of our conversation. My book’s…
This essay examines experimental cinema practices undertaken in postwar Austria, particularly between the late 1950s and early 1960s. The “metrical” films made by Marc Adrian, and Peter Kubelka have been often theorized as being in dialogue with the Viennese modernist music tradition. Building upon existing scholarship, I underscore the impact of the short-lived Wiener Gruppe…
PEAT AND THE PEOPLE: EMERGENT BODIES IN PINA BAUSCH’S LE SACRE DU PRINTEMPS
Fridays • 2:30PM • Klarman Hall • Room 155Open to the public
Fridays • 2:30PM • Klarman Hall • Room 155Open to the publicMarch 14: Thomas Schestag (Brown University)
Das dritte Geschlecht. Ein Queer Reading von Thomas Manns Roman Joseph und seine Brüder
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.
The Heart Left Behind: On Ecstasy and Present Absence in Rilke’s Middle Period
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. The event was…
On September 19, the Institute for German Cultural German Studies, together with the Department of German Studies and the Jewish Studies Program at Cornell had the pleasure of hosting the renowned German-Jewish author and public intellectual Esther Dischereit for a reading of texts from her latest project, the exhibition Wer war Fritz Kittel?
On September 15, 2023, Dr. Jenny Körber (University of Hamburg) presented her paper “Irdische und himmlische Verhältnisse. Ordnungen der Genealogie und Heraldik” in the IGCS Fall Colloquium Series. Dr. Körber, currently a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Hamburg, combines literary criticism and art history in her research. Her work centers on Jesuits, early modern…
Ulrike Vedder: “Auswandern - Heimkehren - Verschellen: Liminales Erzählen und die Kunst des Handelns in der Auswandererliteratur des 19. Jahrhunderts”
Auswandern– Heimkehren – Verschellen: Liminales Erzählen und die Kunst des Handelns inder Auswandererliteratur des 19. Jahrhunderts
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…
The Age of Conspiracy Theories and the Decline of Politics: Freud, Arendt, Agamben
Date: Wednesday, October 12, 2022 Time: 4:30PM Location: A.D. White House, Guerlac Room
The transatlantic research colloquium “Small Forms: Aesthetics—Media—Modernity,” a collaboration with the Graduiertenkolleg “Literatur- und Wissensgeschichte kleiner Formen” at the Humboldt University, Berlin will take place at Cornell University on September 9-11.
„Selbst der Kunst […] ist eine zu starke nationale Bewußtheit nicht zu-träglich.“
On Cornell’s eighth Giving Day, held March 16, 15,905 alumni, students, faculty, staff, parents and friends from more than 80 countries made gifts totaling a record-breaking $12,268,629.
Gifts allow the College to fulfill its mission: preparing students to do the greatest good in the world.
All Colloquium meetings, if not indicated otherwise, will take place at A. D. White House, Room 201 at 2:30.
A $5 million alumni gift will help to support doctoral students in humanities fields within the College of Arts & Sciences.
The program connects undergraduates in A&S with opportunities to work side by side on research with Cornell faculty from across the College.
Professor Patrizia McBride won the 2021 Max Kade prize for best article in The German Quarterly.
The Nexus Scholars program will leverage the student-to-faculty ratio and the vibrant research enterprise in A&S to expand opportunities for students, while also enhancing the culture of collaborative scholarship at Cornell.
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.
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…
German Studies Graduate Student Conference: "Representations of Race and Ethnicity in German Modernity" (March 6-7, 2020)
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-language realist and post-realist…
The College of Arts & Sciences is gearing up for Giving Day on Thursday, March 12 and we hope you'll join in the fun!
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 neither the origins…
JANUARY 24Matthias Müller (German, Cornell University)The Loser’s Edge: Writing from the Vantage Point of the Vanquished
On November 22nd Professor Inka Mülder-Bach (Munich/Princeton) presented the Colloquium Series with a paper focusing on questions surrounding the aesthetic, political, and social stakes of “prose” as both a broad, complex literary medium and as a metaphor underlying certain conceptions of modernity around 1800. Mülder-Bach began by returning to the Latin etymological origins of the…
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 other disciplines dealing…
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, short stories…
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 imperialism as well as…
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 attempts…
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 beginning of…
Day 1, Panel 1: “German Studies, the Humanities, and the University,” with B. Venkat Mani (University of Wisconsin-Madison) and Leslie Morris (University of Minnesota)
SEPTEMBER 6Mark-Georg Dehrmann (Modern German Literature, Humboldt University, Berlin)Dimensions of the Modern Epic. The Example of Phantasmatic Orality
On 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 by Alec Pollak (Cornell, English).…
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 intensive group discussion. All participants had…
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 around…