GSA 2024 Call for Seminar Proposals

The 48th German Studies Association Conference, to be held in Atlanta, GA from September 26–29, 2024, will continue to host a series of seminars in addition to regular panel sessions and roundtables (general conference information is available here). Seminars meet for all three days of the conference. They explore new avenues of academic exchange and foster extended discussion, rigorous intellectual debate, and intensified networking. Seminars are typically proposed and led by two to three conveners and consist of a minimum of 10 and a maximum of 20 participants, including the conveners themselves. Seminars must be open to applications from interested participants, and conveners are expected to make every effort to aim for broad diversity and include scholars from different disciplines, types of institutions, and career stages, including graduate students. Seminars may enable

  • extended discussion of a recent academic publication;
  • exploration of a promising new research topic;
  • engagement with pre-circulated papers;
  • a debate among scholars with different approaches; or
  • in-depth discussion of a political or public policy issue, novel, film, poem, musical piece, painting, or other artwork.

Conveners are strongly encouraged to structure their seminars around creative and engaging forms of intellectual exchange; lengthy individual presentations are discouraged as they resemble those in “traditional” panels and may hamper discussion, collaboration, and innovative thinking. We hope that the work of seminars will eventually be disseminated to the broader community of scholars, for example, in a future GSA panel or roundtable, in an edited volume, or in the creation of a research group.

To apply to convene a seminar, current GSA members should submit a proposal through the online portal by 11:59 pm PST on January 16, 2024. The OpenWater conference submissions portal will open in early January; the link to access the portal will be posted on the conference website. The proposal should include the following items:

  1. Title of Proposed Seminar (indicate sponsoring network if applicable)
  2. Convener Information: names, ranks, institutional affiliations, email addresses; please list conveners in an alphabetical order and provide the same email as the GSA log-in email to avoid future access issues.
  3. Seminar Description: a 150-word description of the seminar's subject and goals, which will eventually be used in the call for participants and the final program
  4. Format Description: a 50-word description of the seminar’s format and procedures, which will appear in the call for participants. For consistency in all seminar proposals, please provide specific information about what participants need to share or prepare before the conference. We suggest that you incorporate a mechanism for individual titled contributions, especially for participants who need to show evidence of presenting a paper for travel grants, institutional support, etc. If participants should pre-circulate their contributions, please provide a specific length in page numbers or word count instead of characters. If readings will be pre-circulated, please be specific regarding the number and length of readings participants will be expected to complete in advance.
  5. DEI Statement (if appropriate): a 50-word statement describing any DEI components of the seminar that are not covered in the above descriptions
  6. Audio/Visual: indicate whether your seminar will require a projector and/or sound (note that we might not be able to accommodate all requests, especially for sound, so please request it only if absolutely necessary)
  7. Auditors: indicate whether you will open the seminar to auditors (6 maximum) should space allow.

The Committee will review seminar proposals and post a list of approved seminars and their topics on the GSA website by February 5, 2024. Conveners may then enlist participants to join the seminar; the application deadline for participants will be Friday, February 23, 2024. A call for auditors (who may observe but who are not considered formal participants) will be issued in the summer after the conference program has been published.

Please note the following guidelines and additional information regarding seminars (they may also be found here):

  • You must be a current member of the GSA to submit a proposal.
  • Seminar conveners must come from different institutions; if there are more than two conveners, no more than two may come from the same institution.
  • In order to facilitate extended discussion, seminar conveners and participants are required to participate in all three seminar meetings.
  • Seminar participants, including conveners, may not submit a paper in a regular panel session. However, they may take on one additional role in the conference independent of their role in a seminar, including as moderator or commentator in a panel or as a roundtable participant. Please review the GSA conference participation guidelines before proceeding to the conference submissions portal. Regular paper submissions by seminar participants/conveners will be deleted in the submission system.
  • Although the GSA does accept proposals from conveners who have directed a seminar during the past two years, the GSA’s Seminar Committee gives preference to newcomers and thus encourages the rotation of seminar conveners in similarly-themed seminars. We further recommend that conveners contact the co-chairs of the Interdisciplinary Network Committee, Dr. Jeff Hayton (jeffrey.hayton@wichita.edu) and Dr. Nancy Nenno (nennon@cofc.edu), to connect with GSA Networks close to their topic.
  • Seminar conveners will have the opportunity to propose a cluster of pieces representing the work of the seminar for publication in Konturen, a peer-reviewed, online, open-access journal of international and interdisciplinary German Studies. Please note: although the portal for applications for publication in Konturen will only open after the conference is over, conveners may address their interest in this project in their seminar description.

To access the OpenWater system to submit your proposal once the conference portal opens in early January (the link to the portal will be posted here), use the same username and password as you use to log into your GSA member profile. If you need to reset your password, please follow these instructions. Should technical questions or problems arise with the submission portal itself, please contact the GSA Operations Director, Dr. Jennifer L. Jenkins (operations@thegsa.org).

The GSA Seminar Committee consists of:

Please get in touch with the chair of the Seminar Committee if you have any questions about the seminars or proposal process. Thank you for your support of the GSA’s seminar program!