Annual Conference Submissions Now Open

GERMAN STUDIES ASSOCIATION ANNUAL CONFERENCE

 

The German Studies Association (GSA) will hold its 45th Annual Conference from 30 September to 3 October 2021. We anticipate meeting in person at the Marriott Indianapolis Downtown in Indianapolis, Indiana. This is a rather long email, but it contains all important links and information about the forthcoming conference.

We look forward to the presentations postponed from 2020 and, in addition, the Program Committee cordially invites new proposals on any aspect of German, Austrian, or Swiss studies, including (but not limited to) history, Germanistik, film and media studies, art history, political science, anthropology, pedagogy scholarship, musicology, economic studies, religious studies, sociology, and cultural studies.

Proposals for entire sessions, for interdisciplinary presentations, and for series of panels are strongly encouraged (though we discourage linked series of more than four panels). Individual paper proposals are also welcome.

The portal for submissions can be accessed *here.*

Important Tip for This Year: 

General Tips:

  • If you did not yet manually reset your User ID or password, they are both the email address associated with your GSA account. Please update your password for security. 
  • If you are having log-in problems, try again later (the system just might be overloaded); if that doesn't work, contact our partners at Johns Hopkins UP for help at GSASupport@press.jhu.edu.
  • Some informational videos for how to upload proposals can be found here: GSA Informational Videos (coming soon)

Please see the GSA website for *information about the submission process for ‘traditional’ papers, sessions, and roundtables*, which will open on 4 January 2020.

  • The deadline for seminar participant applications is Saturday, 30 January, 2021 PST (deadline extended). 
  • The deadline for all other proposals (papers, roundtables, panels) is Monday 15 February 2021, March 1, 11:59pm PST.

Please note that all proposed presenters must be members of the German Studies Association. Information on membership is available on the GSA website (www.thegsa.org).

In order to avoid complications later, the Program Committee would like to reiterate two extremely important guidelines here (the full list of guidelines is available on the GSA website):

  1. No individual at the GSA conference may give more than one paper or appear on the program in more than two separate roles. (Participating in a seminar counts as delivering a paper.)
  2. If a paper proposal requires high quality sound equipment, that justification must be made in detail at the time of submission.

For more information, visit the GSA website, where previous conference programs can be found, and a detailed list of submission guidelines at

https://thegsa.org/conference/submission-guidelines

or contact members of the 2021 Program Committee: 

https://www.thegsa.org/conference/program-committee-2021 

Seminars:

Our conference will again host a series of seminars. Seminars meet for all three days of the conference during the first or second morning slot to foster extended discussion, rigorous intellectual exchange, and intensified networking. They are led by two to four conveners and consist of 10 to 20 participants, at least some of whom should be graduate students. In order to reach the goal of extended discussion, seminar organizers and participants are required to participate in all three installments of the seminar.

This year, the conference will include 13 seminars postponed from the 2020 conference, with many accepting new applications for participants (postponed seminars include information about the number of spots available for new applications), and 15 seminars selected and approved for enrollment through this year’s proposal process. The following seminars have been selected for the 2021 GSA Conference.

You may find detailed descriptions about them *here*.

  1. Centers and Peripheries in Central European History
  2. Comics - A Transgressive Art: Theoretical Foundations and Intersections (sponsored by the Comics Studies Network)
  3. Consumption and Consumers in German-Speaking Lands, 1650-1914
  4. Corpus-Based and Data-Driven Approaches to Teaching German Across the Curriculum
  5. Crime and the Law in Germany from Unification to Reunification
  6. Delivering German Studies for Multiple Publics / Publishing for Diverse Publics
  7. “Entanglements and Separations:” German Histories since 1945
  8. The German Body and Self in Global Circuits of Knowledge and Practice, 1700-1945 (sponsored by the Body Studies Network)
  9. German Parliamentary Democracy in Transition (sponsored by the DAAD)
  10. Germany Faces East: WW I and the Post-War World
  11. Green Frankfurt School
  12. Holocaust Tourism Revisited: Holocaust Memorial Culture between Education, Tourism, and Commemoration
  13. Literature as Medium of Positive Emotions
  14. The Nazi Legacy: Reconstruction Efforts and Memory Projects since 1945
  15. The New Media of Migration
  16. The Pasts and Futures of German Jewish Studies
  17. Performing Exile: Performance and the History of Jewish Refugees from Nazi Europe
  18. Potential Affinities Between Indigenous Studies and German Studies
  19. Problems of Linguistic Indifference in German Studies
  20. Resonance in Art, Film, Literature, Music, and Theory
  21. Sexuality and the Law in German-speaking Europe
  22. Sister Insider: Intersectional Collaborations on the Uses of Anger by Women of Color
  23. Steal This Assignment! Hack Your German Studies Course with the GSA Teaching MakerSpace (sponsored by the Teaching Network)
  24. Theory of Number
  25. To Look Through Court Records – Topics, Methods, Challenges
  26. Tradition and Discontinuity: The Early Modern Period as Solitary Era
  27. Transnational Germans: Local Actors and Global Spaces, Global Actors and Local Spaces
  28. Women’s Drama and Theatre in German

Please contact the Operations Director, Dr. Benita Blessing, for general conference questions, including requests for disability accommodations (operations@thegsa.org).

In closing, and more personally, it is my great pleasure to write to all of you as the new Executive Director. The program for the 2021 conference is already looking exciting based on the postponed presentations from last year, and I look forward to finding out what many of you will share with the GSA membership this year in the form of new proposals. 

I recognize that many of you will want to know as soon as possible what the plans for the 2021 conference will be. I can only ask you for patience and understanding; this year’s unknowns are as vast and complex as last year’s. The only consolation is that we have had a bit of practice in responding quickly when we finally can. Please bear with us. I promise we will update you as soon as we have something to share.

Please accept my very best wishes for a healthy and happy 2021. I eagerly anticipate being able to greet many of you in person in Indianapolis in September.

With kindest regards,

Margaret E. Menninger

Executive Director

director@thegsa.org