Upcoming Events -- Ongoing Events -- Past Events
Past Events
Lecture -- Monday, October 6, 2008 at 4:30 p.m. in Foster 505 
Bernd-Alexander Stiegler, Universität Konstanz
"Montage as Cultural Technique: From Teniers to Chaplin"
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Discussion -- Tuesday, October 7, 2008 at 10:00 a.m. in Wieboldt 206
Discussion with Bernd-Alexander Stiegler of his essay
"Miniaturreisen. Reisen durch die ferne Nähe des Alltags"(.pdf copy available here)
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Wigeland Seminar -- Friday and Saturday, May 9-10, 2008
The Other in Scandinavian Literature and Culture
Norwegian politics of exclusion and inclusion
Øivind Kopperud, Center for Studies of Holocaust and Religious Minorities, Oslo
"‘The Jew’ as the ‘Other’ in Scandinavian Society"
Monika Zagar, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities
"Race and Gender in Knut Hamsun’s Work"
Jews in Denmark
Stefanie v. Schnurbein, University of Chicago/Humboldt Universität Berlin
"Other voices – competing for subjectivity: The case of M.A. Goldschmidt and Mathilde Fibiger"
Jan Schwarz, University of Chicago
"The Language of the Jews – M.A. Goldschmidt’s A Jew Reconsidered"
Other Alterities – Swedish 20th Century Literature
Anna Westerståhl Stenport, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
"Displacements in Strindberg’s Inferno: Setting as a Function of Otherness in transnational modernism"
Ulf Olsson, Stockholm University/University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
"Violence, Otherness and Confession: Lars Norén’s plays"
Cora Lacatus, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
"Performing Identity: Poetry and the Ethnic Other in Contemporary Sweden"
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Lecture -- April 10, 2008
Second Romberg Lecture of 2008: Albrecht Koschorke, Universität Konstanz
"Female Eroticism and Male Friendship in 17th-Century Drama: The Fate of Sophonisbe."
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Conference -- April 10-12, 2008
Women on the Verge: Medea and Other Exiles of the Tragic Stage
Leading scholars from a variety of fields gathered for a three-day international colloquium at the University of Chicago, exploring various points in the career of Medea from Euripides and Seneca through Cherubini and Grillparzer to Wolf and Müller and the films of Pasolini and von Trier. We situated Medea in relation to other tragic heroines, such as Antigone, Iphigenia and Electra, exploring common themes of womanhood, transgression, self-sacrifice, and exile.
Robert Kendrick, University of Chicago
"Understanding Medea in Cicognini and Cavalli's "Il Giasone" (1649)"
David Wray, University of Chicago
"‘Toute méchante qu’elle est’: Stoic Moral Perfectionism and Corneille’s Senecan “Médée."
Glenn W. Most, University of Chicago/Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa
"Four Ways to Misunderstand Euripides’ 'Medea.'"
Edith Hall, Royal Holloway, University of London
"Medea and the Law of Homicide, Ancient and Modern."
Frauke Berndt, University of Frankfurt am Main, Chicago
"Imaginatio Christi: Female Negotiations in Gryphius."
Juliane Vogel, University of Konstanz
"Raptus. Female Speech in Uncomfortable Places."
Françoise Meltzer, University of Chicago
"Theories of Desire: Antigone Again."
Christiane Frey, University of Chicago
"The Anomy of Female Power in Grillparzer and Anouilh."
Yvonne Wübben, Free Universty Berlin
"Women on the Verge: Female Psychosis in Drama and Psychiatry around 1900."
Robert Buch, University of Chicago
"Medeamachine. Aporias and Apologetics of Violence in Heiner Müller."
Sladja Blazan, Humboldt-Universität Berlin/New York University
"Hollywood’s Medeas and the Ghost Genre in the 1940s."
David J. Levin, University of Chicago
"Elektra’s Loneliness (Zurich Opera, 2005)."
Pamela Pascoe
MAD: a Performance Installation
Sponsored by Department of Germanic Studies in collaboration with The Franke Institute for the Humanities, Center for Interdisciplinary Research on German Literature and Culture, Division of the Humanities, France Chicago Center, Office of the Provost, Department of Visual Arts, Bosch Foundation, Department of Classics, Department of Music, Department of Comparative Literature, Master of Arts Program in the Humanities, Philip and Ida Romberg Fund, Program in Poetry and Poetics. Organized by Thomas Bartscherer, Frauke Berndt, Christiane Frey.
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Lecture -- March 7, 2008
First Romberg Lecture of 2008: Slavoj Žižek
"The Spectrality of the Real: A Lacanian Approach."
For a recording of Slavoj Žižek's 2008 Romberg Lecture, please click here.
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Workshop -- March 8 and 9, 2008
The Return to Presence
This workshop explored the various ways in which philosophical, literary, visual, musicological, religious, and cultural studies are reasserting forms of immediacy, intensity, encounter, contact, the Real, excess, event, birth, suddenness, in a word, whatever breaks through (shatters, overwhelms, exceeds…) the hermeneutic enterprise, the always unfinished labor of unfolding the meaning of texts against the backdrop of cultural and historical contexts.
Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Stanford University
Mladen Dolar, University of Ljubljana
Frauke Berndt, Universität Frankfurt am Main/University of Chicago
Dieter Mersch, Potsdam University
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Lecture Series -- Winter 2008
January 7, 2008
Christopher Wild, UCLA
"Cartesian Ceroplastics: Meditating the Mediality of the Mind"
January 11, 2008
Sonja Boos, Princeton University
"Legality on Trial. Drama, Law, and Testimony in Peter Weiss's Die Ermittlung"
January 18, 2008
Stefan Andriopoulos, Columbia University
“Evidence, Enlightenment, Terror: Ghost Narratives and the Gothic Novel in the Late Eighteenth Century”
January 22, 2008
Sarah Pourciau, Stanford University
"Was heisst lesen?: Heidegger, Reading"
February 1, 2008
Ilinca Iurascu, University of Pennsylvania
"Postal Time: Gutzkow's Telegraph, Benjamin's Mailbox"
February 15, 2008
Susanne Lüdemann, Universität Konstanz
"Vom Tauschwert der Literatur. Gottfried Kellers semiotischer Realismus am Beispiel seiner Novelle "Die mißbrauchten Liebesbriefe”
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Conference -- November 8 and 9, 2007
Multilingual Jewish Literature and Multicultural America
Jewish American literature has long been, and continues to be, a multilingual enterprise, with significant work published in at least six languages (English, Spanish, Ladino, German, Yiddish, and Hebrew). The literary study of Jewish American writing, however, has been overwhelmingly defined by an English-only approach unable to encompass its diversity, or to locate that diversity in the multilingual and multicultural landscape of American literature as a whole. The conference we are now planning, “Multilingual Jewish Literature and Multicultural America,” will survey the field of multilingual Jewish American literature and the new methodological approaches that are needed, we believe, to sustain and reinvigorate the academic study of this literature in the coming decade.
Werner Sollors, Harvard University
"A New Literary History of America"
Stewart Figa and Ilya Levinson
"Yiddish Song Performance."
Maeera Y. Shreiber, University of Utah
"None Is Like You, Shulamite: Linguistic Longings in Anglophone Jewish American Poetry."
Norman Finkelstein, Xavier University
“Ghosts of Yiddish in Avant-Garde American Poetry.”
Eric Selinger, DePaul University, will respond.
Jeffrey Grossman, University of Virginia
“The Staging of Emotion, Or How the Yiddish Poets Read Heinrich Heine.”
Jan Schwarz, University of Chicago
“Yiddish Poetry Readings at the 92 Street Y in New York, 1963-1969.”
Hana Wirth-Nesher, Tel Aviv University
“Hebrew Letters, Boundary Crossings: Henry Roth’s Mercy of a Rude Streamn and Gilles Rozier The Mercy Room”
Ilan Stavans, Amherst College
“Ladino in the American Imagination.”
Alan Mintz, Jewish Theological Seminary of America
“Late Romanticism as a Critique of Modernity: The Case of American Hebrew Poetry.”
Mikhail Krutikov, University of Michigan at Ann Arbor
"A Great American Novel in Yiddish, Russian Style: Dovid Ignatoff's Trilogy Oyf vayte vegn (1932)."
Co-sponsored by the Franke Institute for the Humanities, the Committee on Jewish Studies and the Department of Germanic Studies.
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Concert -- May 3, 2007
CUBE Goes for Brecht
In honor of the 50th anniversary of Bertolt Brecht’s death, four German and four American composers were commissioned to write new music based on Brecht’s work. Having premiered last year to rave reviews in Germany (as performed by Ensemble JungeMusik) the American debut will be performed by CUBE Contemporary Chamber Ensemble. The bill features works by Lawrence Axelrod, John Eaton, Janice Misurell-Mitchell and Anna Rubin from the US and Johannes Hildebrandt, Ellen Hünigen, Sebastien Stier and Helmut Zapf from Germany. Sharon Quattrin will be the guest soprano and Helmut Zapf the guest conductor, in addition to members of CUBE. Five of the composers will be in attendance. Admission is free.
The concert is co-sponsored by the Renaissance Society, the Department of Germanic Studies, the Department of Music and the Elizabeth F. Cheney Foundation.
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Workshop -- April 2, 4, 6, 2007
Biblical Narrative. A Workshop conducted by Jan Assmann and Albrecht Koschorke.
Recent years have seen numerous endeavours to read the Bible, especially the “narrating books” of the Old Testament, as literary texts. This does not exclude the issues of theology and the history of religion, but does place emphasis on the narrative arrangement of the episodes in question and on the craft of their writers. In particular, this approach casts light on text omissions, cases of indetermination and ambiguity. In this workshop, we carefully read some of the most popular stories from the first two books of Moses, Genesis and Exodus.
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Film Screening -- February 7, 2007
Das Leben der Anderen (The Lives of Others, 2006)
The Department of Germanic Studies and the Committee on Cinema and Media Studies, in cooperation with Sony Pictures Classics, presents the Chicago premiere of the award-winning debut film by Florian von Donnersmarck to be followed by a conversation with the filmmaker.
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Reading/Lecture -- February 15 and 16, 2007
POEM PRESENT: Durs Grünbein
Durs Grünbein is the author of seven volumes of poetry, most recently Ashes for Breakfast (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006, tr. Michael Hoffman) and a collection of essays. His work has been awarded many major German literary prizes, including the highest, the Georg-Büchner-Preis, which he won at age 33. Grünbein's collections of poetry include Grauzone morgens and Schädelbasislektion. In 1995, he received the Peter Huchel Prize for Poetry. He has also published several essay collections and new translations of plays from antiquity, among them Aeschylus' The Persians , and Seneca's Thyestes. His work, which also includes contributions to catalogues and a libretto for opera, has been translated into many languages. He has lived in Berlin since 1985.
Co-sponsored by the Center for Interdisciplinary Research on German Literature and Culture
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Conference -- February 2-3, 2007
Literary Inquiry Today: A Norwegian-American Conversation
Zeljka Svrljuga, Universitetet i Bergen and Deborah Nelson, University of Chicago
"Pain, Passion, Parody."
Lars Sætre, Universitetet i Bergen and Robert Buch, University of Chicago
"Violence, Repetition, Sublimity."
Eirik Vassenden, Universitetet i Bergen and Eric Santner, University of Chicago
"Modernity and the Vital Sphere."
Randi Koppen, Universitetet i Bergen and Stefanie von Schnurbein, Humboldt Universität Berlin
"Food, Fashion and the Body."
Co-sponsored by the Andrew E. and G. Norman Wigeland Memorial Endowment in Norwegian Language, Literature, and Culture.
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Lecture -- October 13, 2006
Ethel Matala de Mazza, Harvard University:
"Für eine kleine Politik. Verhandlungen der Moderne
zwischen Siegfried Kracauer, Carl Schmitt und Max Weber."
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Romberg Lecture -- October 23, 2006
Karl Heinz Bohrer
"Stil als Provokation. Vier Paradigmen zu einem emphatischen Begriff: Goethe, Nietzsche, Brentano, Heine."
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Lecture and Workshop -- May 12, and May 18, 2006
Dieter Mersch, University of Potdam:
"The Logic of Images" (W.T.J. Mitchell and Mark Hansen, respondents)
"On the Chiasmus of Language"
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Roundtable Discussion -- May 11, 2006
Anna Stenport, University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign
and
Stefanie von Schnurbein, University of Chicago:
"Urban space, domestic economies and the dangers of female hunger in Henrik Ibsen's A Dollhouse, August Strindberg's The Pelican, and Henrik Ibsen's Hedda Gabler."
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Lecture -- January 25, 2006
Ken Calhoon, University of Oregon:
"Sovereign Innocence: Schiller's 'Spaziergang' and the Naive Subject."
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Lecture and Workshop -- February 22, and February 23, 2006
Thomas Böning, University of Jerusalem:
"Paul Celan's Meridian"
"Celan--Büchner--Heidegger"
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Romberg Lecture and Workshop -- February 28, and March 1, 2006
Winfried Menninghaus, FU Berlin:
"The Function(s) of Art. Perspectives on transcendental and evolutionary aesthetics."
"Hölderlin's sapphic mode: Revising the myth of the male Pindaric seer"
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Please also see the Events Archive of the Center for Interdisciplinary Research