Department of German and Dutch
GERMAN COURSE INFORMATION For full information about DUTCH courses and staff please CLICK HERE
Recent News and Events
Mabusefest
On 12 July, a very productive workshop focused on Fritz Lang's classic Das Testatment des Dr. Mabuse was held between teaching and graduate members of the department and visitors from Berkeley (Tony Kaes is pictured, centre-right), also with Erica Carter (pictured, left).
Next Schröder Professor Appointed
Sarah Colvin (currently University of Warwick) has been elected to the Schröder Professorship of German and will take up the post in January 2014. Prof. Colvin studied German language and literature at the Universities of Oxford and Hamburg. Her DPhil in 1995 considered women and Turkish characters in early opera and drama, and a book called The Rhetorical Feminine: Gender and Orient on the German Stage (1999) emerged out of that research. She was a postdoctoral research fellow at St John’s College, Oxford, working on women and theatre (Women and German Drama: Playwrights and their Texts, 2003). In 1997 she went to a lecturership at the University of Edinburgh and became Eudo C. Mason Chair of German there in 2004. As a Humboldt Fellow at Potsdam University she read texts produced by and about the German journalist-turned-terrorist Ulrike Meinhof; the monograph Ulrike Meinhof and West German Terrorism appeared in 2009. Her current research is on narrative, particularly narratives by prisoners and the use and functions of literary narratives, not only in prisons.She is Vice-President of the Association for German Studies (AGS).
D. H. Green Annual Memorial Lecture
This year's lecture will be given by Prof. HaJo Solms (Martin-Luther Universität Halle-Wittenberg) at 5 pm on Friday 17 May, in the Senior Parlour, Magdalene College. The title is 'Zur Grammatik einer nichtnormalisierten Sprachstufe: Das Mittelhochdeutsche' and all are welcome.
Pembroke Student Making Name as Sports Journalist
On the occasion of Wembley Stadium hosting this year’s all-German UEFA Champions League Final, the Berlin newspaper Der Tagesspiegel published an article by Pembroke German student Kit Holden about the highs and lows of being an English supporter of a German football team. Kit has been writing freelance pieces for the newspaper since last summer when he did an internship with them, thanks to an introduction by the Department’s Prof. Chris Young. Kit also appeared on ZDF’s ‘heute journal’ and ‘das aktuelle sportstudio’ in connection with the Wembley final, and he has recently written further sports commentaries for FOCUS Online and The Independent.
Lucia Ruprecht awarded Humboldt Research Fellowship
Congratulations to Lucia Ruprecht, who has been awarded a Humboldt Research Fellowship to work in Berlin during 2013-14. Dr Ruprecht will be working with Prof. Dr. Gabriele Brandstetter at the Institut für Theater- und Tanzwissenschaft at the Free University Berlin. Her project, entitled 'Expression and Authorship in German Literature, Film and Dance c. 1910-1925', will reconstruct the notion of expression (Ausdruck) and its effects on conceptions of authorship across three different media. Engaging with a combination of historical theoretical discourse and artistic practice, it aims to offer refocused readings of a broad range of primary material, and revisions of widely-held assumptions about Expressionism's ideologies.
Martin Ruehl awarded a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship
Congratulations to Martin Ruehl, who has been awarded a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship for the coming academic year. Dr Ruehl has provided the following information about the research he will be conducting:
'German philosophers and writers - from Herder and Goethe via Nietzsche and Thomas Mann to Carl Schmitt and Ulrich Beck - have provided some of the most influential formulations of the European idea. For almost all of them, the question of Europe was closely intertwined with the "German question". My research project is a rigorously historical analysis of the changing ways in which German intellectuals conceived of this special relationship in the two hundred-odd years between the end of the Enlightenment and the EU's first constitutional crisis. Using published as well as unpublished sources, I aim to reconstruct the specific German debates in which "Europa" was imagined : as a guarantor for peace and civilization, a vehicle for social and political emancipation, a means for empire-building and the conquest of new markets, and, finally, as the framework for a new "post-national" identity. My goal is to show that despite these transformations, the German idea of Europe was defined by certain constant features, notably the belief in Germany's elevated role and special mission.'
Inaugural Boltzmann Lecture
On 19 October 2012, HE the Austrian Ambassador, Dr Emil Brix, delivered a lecture on 'Revisiting fin-de-siècle Vienna' to inaugurate an annual series on Austrian Culture, co-sponsored by the Ludwig Boltzmann Institut für Geschichte und Theorie der Biographie in Vienna.
New Professor and new Reader
Congratulations to Christopher Young, who from 1 October 2012 becomes Professor of Medieval and Modern German Studies, and to Michael Minden, who from the same date becomes Reader in Modern German Literature and Culture.
Major AHRC Award for research on the Kaiserchronik
Mark Chinca and Christopher Young have been awarded funding of c. £950K by the AHRC to produce, with Jürgen Wolf (Marburg), the first ever full edition of the twelfth-century Kaiserchronik. Further details about the project.
Honour for Schröder Professor
Schröder Professor and leading international Goethe expert, Nicholas Boyle, has been honoured by an international conference at NUI Maynooth on the subject of 'Goethe's Faust in Music').
Screening of Der Sturz. Honeckers Ende
On Monday, 21 May, 4.30 pm, Eric Friedler (NDR) will introduce a screening of his 90-minute documentary film Der Sturz. Honeckers Ende. This will be followed by remarks and a discussion with the director. All are welcome.
Venue: Bateman Auditorium, Gonville and Caius College.
(Organised jointly with the Modern European History Seminar and the Public and Popular History Seminar.)
Bilingual reading by Jan Brandt
On Thursday, 8 March 2012, German writer (shortlisted for the German Buchpreis) will read from his novel Gegen die Welt at 5.30 p.m. in The Senior Parlour, Gonville and Caius College. The event will be in German and English, and all are welcome.
D. H. Green Memorial Lecture
The first annual D. H. Green Memorial Lecture was given on Friday 2 March 2012 in the Dirac Room, St John’s College. The speaker was Prof. Jens Haustein (Jena) and his topic: Zwischen Geschichte und Mythos: Die Wartburg als Literaturort vom Hochmittelalter bis ins 19. Jahrhundert.
David Wagner visits the Department of German and Dutch
On 9 February 2012, prize-winning writer David Wagner visited the Department and gave a lecture on Berlin and a reading from his novel Meine nachtblaue Hose.
Chris Young wins a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship
The Department congratulates Chris Young who has been awarded a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship for the next two academic years during which he will work on his project 'German Sport c. 1920 - c. 1960: Media Entertainment in Four Political Systems'.
New Publication
Joachim Whaley, Germany and the Holy Roman Empire (1493-1806), 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011)
Germany and the Holy Roman Empire engages with all the major debates among both German and English-speaking historians about early modern German history over the last sixty years and offers a striking new interpretation of this important period. See further details here and by clicking on the small images to the right.
See also a related feature on the Cambridge University research website.
Weltweite Kleist-Lesung
The Department participated in a worldwide series of readings to mark the 200th anniversary of the death of Heinrich von Kleist on Monday 21 November 2011. Members of the Department read a selection of prose and drama pieces in celebration of the work of one of Germany's greatest writers. Photos of the occasion; Heinrich-von-Kleist Portal; Poster.
Major Research Project
"The Impact of Idealism: the legacy of post-Kantian German thought" (Principal Investigator: Prof. Nicholas Boyle) is a major international cross-disciplinary network investigating the legacy of German Idealism. The project, funded by the Leverhulme and Newton Trusts, brings together leading scholars from the UK, Germany and the US in the fields of Philosophy and Science, Historical and Social Thought, Religion, and Literature and Aesthetics. The culmination of the project will be an interdisciplinary conference, to be held in Cambridge in September 2012.
Elsa Strietman wins major funding award
The Department congratulates Elsa Strietman, whose collaborative project (with PI, Adrian Armstrong) on 'Transcultural Critical Editing: Vernacular Poetry in the Burgundian Netherlands, 1450-1530' has won a major research grant from the AHRC.
Schröder Professor (Emeritus) Awarded Order of Merit
Congratulations to Prof. Roger C. Paulin who was recently awarded the Bundesverdienstkreuz at a ceremony at the German Embassy in London.
Recent Publication Wins Two Major Prizes
Christopher Young and Kai Schiller, The 1972 Munich Olympics And The Making of Modern Germany, University of California Press (2010) This publication has won two major awards this year: the annual book award of the North American Society of Sport History - this is the biggest prize in the field, and it is only the third time it has gone out of North America - and the prestigious British award, the Aberdare Literary Prize for Sport History.The 1972 Munich Olympics-remembered almost exclusively for the devastating terrorist attack on the Israeli team-were intended to showcase the New Germany and replace lingering memories of the Third Reich. That hope was all but obliterated in the early hours of September 5, when gun-wielding Palestinians murdered 11 members of the Israeli team. In the first cultural and political history of the Munich Olympics, Kay Schiller and Christopher Young set these Games into both the context of 1972 and the history of the modern Olympiad. Delving into newly available documents, the authors chronicle the impact of the Munich Games on West German society.
See related feature on the Cambridge University research website.
Conference
Urworte: a conference in honour of Prof. Nicholas Boyle was held at Magdalene College on 29-31 August 2011. For full details of the programme click here (pdf) or here (Word doc).
Sommerschule Wust
As for the last 20 years, a group of students from the Department of German and Dutch took part in the annual "Sommerschule Wust" as teachers of English (see Süddeutsche Zeitung article here). Some were also involved in a production of Chekhov's play The Cherry Orchard, in German and English, directed by Arthur Shettle (New York): review, photo 1, photo 2.
Read how a researcher at Cambridge University has shown that Germany is the happiest country in the world!
Recent Conferences
- Other People's Pain: Narratives of Trauma and the Question of Ethics, 19-20 March 2010 at CRASSH. An interdisciplinary conference, co-funded by the Department, that aims to explore the obligations and dangers inherent in narratives based on trauma, violence and terror as well as in work on these texts.
For earlier events see our News and Events Archive
