Professor Ruppert-Smith, M. presented in a panel entitled “Enhancing Intercultural Competency through Courses” at the Annual Conference of the National Collegiate Honors Society in Denver, CO in October 2014.

Professor Morgan Koerner’s book chapter “Beyond Media Critique: Performance and Pop-cultural Pleasuresin Elfriede Jelinek and Frank Castorf’s Raststätte oder sie machens alle” has been published in A Different Germany: Pop and the Negotiation of German Culture.

At the annual ACTFL (American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages) conference in San Antonio, Texas in November 2014, Professor Stephen Della Lana made two presentations:

1) Changes in the Landscape: Study Abroad Programs in the 21st Century 

2) Putting German to work: The Summer Internship Program in Germany 

The Department of German and Slavic Studies, the Global Business Resource Center, the Global Awareness Forum  and the Initiative Public Choice and Market Process sponsored a roundtable discussion entitled”The Night the Berlin Wall Fell and Germany rocked!  A 25th Anniversary Commemoration of the Fall of Berlin Wall” on Thursday, November 13, 2014 at 7 pm in the Mathematics and Science Building, Room 129.

Moderator, Dr. Peter Calcagno, Professor of Economics, College of Charleston
Dr. Wolfgang Elfe, Distinguished Professor Emeritus of German, University of South Carolina
Dr. Richard Bodek, Professor of History and Coordinator of the Faculty Liberal Arts & Sciences    Colloquium
Dr. Rene Dentiste Mueller, Professor, Director of the International Business Program
Dr. Malte Pehl, Assistant Professor, International Studies Dept.
Dr. Max Kovalov, Initiative for Public Choice and Market Process and Adjunct Instructor, Political         Science Dept.

The panel discussed this monumental event in terms of its place in history and offered first -hand accounts of how Germany’s division has impacted the panel members’ lives. The presenters also highlighted historical memory from post-Soviet economic and political perspectives.

At the German Studies Association Annual Conference on September 18-21 in Kansas City Missouri, Dr. Nancy Nenno participated in a three-day seminar entitled “Black German Studies” and presented her study titled “Thinking in Multiples: Generating Black Diaporas in Austria.”

At the same conference, Professor Corey Twitchell collaborated in the seminar “German-Jewish Literature after 1945: Working Through and Beyond the Holocaust” where he presented research on the deployment of Yiddish language and literature in post-Holocaust novels written by German Jews.

On March 12, 6pm in Addlestone 227, the Department of German & Slavic Studies will host Maryville University’s Dr. Johannes Wich-Schwarz who will present “The Not-Word: German-Jewish Poetry after the Holocaust.”

What does it mean to write in German as a Jewish author after the Holocaust? Can poetry recover, reclaim, and renew language after unspeakable trauma? How do we translate poetry written on the edge of silence? Johannes Wich-Schwarz (Maryville University) considers questions and others in a presentation on German-Jewish poetry written after 1945. The presentation offers an introduction to poets who reconfigured the aesthetic landscape of post-war Germany and demonstrated the importance of poetry after Auschwitz, including the internationally renowned Paul Celan and Nelly Sachs as well as the influential German language poets Rose Ausländer, Hilde Domin, and Erich Fried. Professor Wich-Schwarz is the author ofTransformation of Language and Religion in Rainer Maria Rilke and is currently completing a volume of English translations of German-Jewish poetry.