Conferences

Friday, February 15, 2008
Thinking Urban Space
2008 Graduate Student Conference
Sponsored by the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures, GAPSA, SASGov, and School of Design


Sunday, March 30, 2008
Van Pelt Library – Sixth Floor

3420 Walnut Street

University of Pennsylvania Campus

(entrance on Locust Walk between 34th and 36th Streets)

Becoming Modern: The German-Jewish Experience

An Interdisciplinary Symposium

In a recent book, Yuri Slezkine described the twentieth century as a "Jewish Age" -- to be modern would essentially mean to be a Jew.  In German historical and cultural studies, this linkage has long been made --only in reference to the last years of the German monarchy and the time of the Weimar Republic. Indeed, what has become known as "modern" German culture--reflected in literature, music, and the visual arts and in a multitude of public media--has been more often than not assigned to Jewish authorship or Jewish subjects. But what do authorship and subject mean in this case? Do we locate the German-Jewish experience as the driving force of this new ?gmodernity,?h or is our understanding of this experience the result of this new "modern" world?

A group of scholars, drawn from the United States and abroad, will explore the relationship of "modernity" and the German-Jewish experience in a day-long symposium that will be open to the general public. The symposium will be accompanied by a musical event, and an exhibition in Penn's rare book division, Van Pelt Library.

We would like to thank the following for their generous support: University of Pennsylvania Dean’s Fund, Jewish Studies Program, University Research Foundation, Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures, Van Pelt Library, Penn Humanities Forum, Department of Religious Studies, Program in Comparative Literature, Department of the History of Art.


Friday - Sunday, April 11 - 13, 2008

Herder, Music and Enlightenment
An Interdisciplinary Symposium
Penn Humanities Forum
3619 Locust Walk
Philadelphia, PA 19104

April 11-13, 2008

Organizer: Emily Dolan (Music)
Further information: dolanei@sas.upenn.edu
Registration: zazulia@sas.upenn.edu

This Event is Free and Open to the Public.

This event was made possible by the generous support of the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Arts and Sciences, the Deutscher Akademischer Austausch Dienst, the University Research Foundation, the Department of Music, the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures, the Department of the History and Sociology of Science, the Penn Humanities Forum, and the Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

Lectures/Colloquia/Films

German Film Series

• Monday, January 14, 2008
  Graduate Student Colloquium
  4:00 pm, Max Kade German Culture and Media Center, Room 329A, 3401 Walnut Street (entrance next to Starbuck's)
  Speakers will be:
  
  Lori Sundberg, Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures
  "Strindberg's Lost Knowledge of Thule and the Cycle of History"
  
  Curtis Swope, Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures
  "Crisis of Living, Crisis of Dwelling: Everyday Placelessness in Wolfgang Hilbig's Nachwende Novels"
  
  
• Thursday, January 17, 2008
  4:00 pm, Max Kade German Culture and Media Center, Room 329A, 3401 Walnut Street (entrance next to Starbuck's)
  A presentation by
  Adrian Daub, Program in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory
  "Married...with Doppelganger: Fichte and Jean Paul on the Metaphysics of Marriage"
  
  
• Tuesday, January 22, 2008
  4:00 pm, Max Kade German Culture and Media Center, Room 329A, 3401 Walnut Street (entrance next to Starbuck's)
  A presentation by
  Ilinca Iurascu , Program in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory
  "Postal Time: Gutzkow's Telegraph, Benjamin's Mailbox"
  
  
• Thursday, February 28, 2008
  Graduate Student / Faculty Colloquium
  4:00 pm, Max Kade German Culture and Media Center, Room 329A, 3401 Walnut Street (entrance next to Starbuck's)
  Speakers will be:
  
  Claire Jones, Program for Comparative Literature and Literary Theory
  "Dis bermit, das hie umbe gat:  Material Text and Mystical Subjectivity in Das vliessende lieht der gotheit"
  
  Dr. Bethany Wiggin, Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures
  "Selling Pennsylvania: Eighteenth-Century German Colonists, Schlaraffenland, and the New World"
  
  
• Thursday, March 6, 2008
  4:00 pm, Max Kade German Culture and Media Center, Room 329A, 3401 Walnut Street (entrance next to Starbuck's)
  
  "Herder's Rhetoric"
  
  a talk by Dr. Kelly Barry, Professor and Director of Graduate Studies, Columbia University
  
  
  
  
• Thursday, April 10, 2008
  Graduate Student / Faculty Colloquium
  4:00 pm, Max Kade German Culture and Media Center, Room 329A, 3401 Walnut Street (entrance next to Starbuck's)
  Speakers will be:
  
  Gabriella Skwara, Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures
  "The 'Dervish Code' and the Educational Project of Lessing's Nathan der Weise"
  
  Dr. Ilya Vinitsky, Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures
  "From the Odyssey to Theodyssey: Vasily Zhukovsky's Translation of Homer's Epic and the German Revolution of 1848"
  
  
• Thursday, April 17, 2008
  4:00 pm, Max Kade German Culture and Media Center, Room 329A, 3401 Walnut Street (entrance next to Starbuck's)
  
  "Hannah Arendt on the Miracle of Loosing and Retrieving Conscience"
  
  a talk by Dr. Alon Segev, Near Eastern Languages and Literatures
  
  
• Tuesday, April 22, 2008
  1:00 pm, Max Kade German Culture and Media Center, Room 329A, 3401 Walnut Street (entrance next to Starbuck's)
  
  Please join the German 691 seminar for a colloquium on "Writing Amerika"
  
  Presenters will be:
  
  Claire Taylor Jones, "Prelude to the New World: The Role of Voice in the Mysticism of Pennsylvania German Conrad Beissel (1691 - 1768)
  Kathryn Malczyk, "Herzog Ernst's Indian Princess and the Complexity of Alterity"
  Kristin Sincavage, "Collecting the Other: Representing America in the Gottorf Kunstkammer"
  
  
• Thursday, April 24, 2008
  Delta Phi Alpha German Honor Society Induction Ceremony
  5:00 pm, Max Kade German Culture and Media Center (Room 329A, 3401 Walnut Street, entrance next to Starbuck's)
  
  Guest Speaker: Dr. Bettina Brandt , Montclair State University
  "Literatur der Migration und Aesthetik der Avantgarde"
  
  
• Friday, May 2, 2008
  5:00 pm, Fisher-Bennett Hall 401
  Journal of the History of Ideas presents:
  
  Steven Cassedy, Professor of Slavic and Comparative Literature, University of California, San Diego
  

  Speaking on: Beethoven the Romantic: How E.T.A. Hoffmann Got It Right
  
  Reception to follow