Faculty, graduate students active at German studies conference
Sara Lennox, director of German and Scandinavian Studies and president of the German Studies Association, presided over the GSA’s 32nd annual conference held Oct. 2-5 in St. Paul, Minn.
The GSA is a multi- and interdisciplinary association of scholars in German, Austrian and Swiss history, literature, culture studies, political science and economics.
Lennox’s presidential address was titled “Transnational Approaches and Their Challenges.”
An unusually large number of other campus faculty and graduate students participated in the conference this year, according to professor Barton Byg.
Lennox also chaired a panel on “African and Asian Responses to German Colonialism” and served as a commentator at a panel on “Gender and the Cold War,” a collaboration between the GSA and the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies.
Adjunct professor Sky Arndt-Briggs organized and moderated a panel on “Money as Metaphor: Cultural Meanings of Money.” She also presented the paper “Curating East German Art: the Case of Film in North America” on a panel that emphasized exhibiting visual arts and material culture of the GDR, “Post-Wende Exhibitions and Evaluations of GDR Art.”
Byg served as commentator on two panels, “New Perspectives on Konrad Wolf: History, Memory, Nationality” and “The New Berlin: Critical Literary Treatments of Urban Space in Transition.”
Assistant professor Andy Donson gave a paper, “Sabotage Around the World: Comintern Agent Otto Braun in Germany, China, and the Soviet Union,” for the panel “Communism and Transnationalism: The World-Wide Agitation by Comintern Agents.” He also gave the commentary for the panel “Changing Perspectives on Childhood, 1870-1960.”
Assistant professor Jonathan Skolnik presented a paper on the Berlin Jewish museum’s 1937 Abravanel exhibition as part of a panel on Jewish museums in Germany. The paper will be published in expanded form as part of a book edited by Robin Ostow.
Associate professor Robert Sullivan commented on a panel entitled “Dreams and the German Middle Ages,” sponsored by the organization YMAGINA.
Jon Berndt Olsen, assistant professor of History, took part in a roundtable on “Making the GDR: Constructing a Socialist Society in the East after 1945.”
Ph.D. candidate Brenda Bethman moderated a panel called “Muttis, Spiesser, and Freakish Femmes: In Search of Feminism in the Fraeuleinwunder. “ On that panel, Ph.D. candidate Allie Merley Hill gave a paper called “Das Mutti-Prinzip: Representations of Motherhood in Current German Literature.”
Doctoral student Evan Torner co-organized a breakfast meeting of the GSA Graduate Caucus and presented the paper “Black/White/Red Indians: Race in Konrad Petzold’s OSCEOLA” on the panel, “DEFA and Latin America: East German Perspectives on Latin America/Latin American Perspectives on the GDR in Film.” The panel was organized by participants at the 2007 DEFA Summer Film Institute.
On the opening day of the conference, the DEFA Film Library presented its fifth annual GSA German film series, featuring four films in new DVD release. According to Byg, the high point for the DEFA Film Library was the premiere at the GSA of its DVD restoration of Brecht/Dudow’s 1932 work, “Kuhle Wampe” (Who Owns the World?), one of the most important works of German film history.
October 16, 2008.
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