Call for Auditors, GSA 2021

CALL FOR AUDITORS

Dear Colleagues:

This year’s GSA Conference in Indianapolis will again feature a number of three-day seminars. As in the past, this year’s conference will also allow for a limited number of auditors to attend individual seminar streams. Auditors attend the seminar but are not formal participants, so they may take on other presenting roles at the conference. Please note that the specific roles and rules for auditors will be defined by the respective seminar conveners.

If you are interested in auditing a seminar, please contact and apply to the seminar’s convenors directly. Below you will find a list of seminars available for auditors, including information about whether the seminar is in-person or virtual. Due to space restrictions and other considerations, we must ask convenors not to admit more auditors to their seminars than the number specified. The number of auditors is limited to six regardless of the number of conveners and active participants. 

Sincerely yours,

Margaret Eleanor Menninger, Executive Director of the GSA

Vance Byrd, 2021 GSA Program Director

Elizabeth Drummond, Chair of the GSA Seminar Committee

Richard Langston, GSA Seminar Committee

 

01. Centers and Peripheries in Central European History (virtual seminar)

5 spots for auditors

Conveners:

Abstract:

What is Central Europe? And where? This seminar will explore the role of German-speaking people in the creation and definition of Central Europe as a geographical, cultural, and political concept from the early modern to the modern period. The possibility of Central Europe reemerged in the wake of communism, but linguistic, cultural, and state-based concepts of a region "between" had a much older lineage. Moreover, Central Europe is more than just German-speaking, and we are interested in interrogating the concept and position of “German Studies” beyond and within the German lands. The role of German communities and their contribution to the development of Central Europe (both materially and as a concept), as well as their interactions with other ethno-linguistic groups, are salient themes. This seminar will evaluate the importance of “German-ness” in understanding Central Europe and use that to explore the field’s position within the broader framework of “German Studies.”

 

02. Comics - A Transgressive Art: Theoretical Foundations and Intersections (Sponsored by the Comics Studies Network) (virtual seminar)

3 spots for auditors

Conveners:

Abstract:

This seminar builds on the work of the newly established Comics Studies Network of the GSA. Past panels and roundtables on various historical and thematic aspects of comics provide evidence for the medium’s critical intervention in discussions of individual identity and issues of social justice. Recognizing the transgressive potential of comics to enable synergies between research and teaching and to invite dialogue among creators, consumers, and critics, we also see the demand for a more robust theoretical discussion of the affordances of comics. The seminar will thus examine foundational works of Comics Studies in order to establish a systematic theoretical framework within which to situate specific investigations. To explore the interdisciplinary possibilities of comics scholarship, we are interested in attracting scholars from a variety of disciplines and positions, including graduate students, who employ diverse approaches to questions of form, function, production, and reception with regard to German-language comics.

 

03. Consumption and Consumers in German-Speaking Lands, 1650-1914 (in-person seminar)

4 spots for auditors

Conveners:

Abstract:

German historians and philosophers have contributed a great deal to the literature on critiques of consumption.What they have not done so well, by comparison with historians of the United States, France, and Great Britain, is to study consumption itself: what exactly was consumed, when, and by whom.Progress in this area has also been impeded by fragmentary source materials and by divisions between economic, social, and cultural historians; arbitrary period designations have prevented what might be generative conversations across early modern and modern worlds.This seminar, convened by an early modern and a modern specialist, aims to bring together junior and senior scholars to brainstorm future directions in the field.We welcome scholars from all disciplines who are at work on topics relating to Central European business, trade, food, the environment, media, gender, and material culture.

 

04. Corpus-Based and Data-Driven Approaches to Teaching German Across the Curriculum (in-person seminar)

6 spots for auditors

Conveners:

Abstract:

Text and linguistic corpora can be used to investigate language from every angle and have long informed the creation of lexicographical resources, textbooks, and other instructional and learning tools. Teaching with corpora or with corpus-based approaches and methods is a comparatively new development that in recent decades has prompted new types of teaching resources, classroom activities, and studies testing their effectiveness. In combination with other approaches to teaching lexis, grammar, syntax, and pragmatics, on the one hand, and literature, history, and culture, on the other, data-driven and corpus-based approaches offer a wide array of tools for all levels of language and content courses taught in the L2. This seminar seeks to bring together researchers and teachers from applied and theoretical linguistics, literature, and other disciplines in German Studies to explore the cross-disciplinary pedagogical avenues opened by these approaches and discuss the application of current projects in German instruction. 

 

05. Crime and the Law in Germany from Unification to Reunification (virtual seminar)

5 spots for auditors

Conveners:

Abstract:

In the film M, Hans Beckert stood accused of being a serial child murderer before a jury of career criminals. Beckert argued that basic issues were at stake, including moral compulsion, autonomy and justice, and the rights of citizens to free and fair trials. These issues will be explored in the proposed seminar. Questions of guilt, judgment, and surveillance are central to the history of crime, sexuality, and justice in the modern world. What, in the end, makes a crime ‘criminal’?  We are looking for papers that link individual crimes and/or criminal proceedings to society and politics at large. We are especially interested in the interrelationship of the police, justice system, and the civilian population. We are open to papers that treat both true crime and fictional writing in various eras to try to better understand the periods at hand.  

 

06. Delivering German Studies for Multiple Publics / Publishing for Diverse Publics (in-person seminar)

6 spots for auditors

Conveners:

Abstract:

At a moment when the very facts of public discourse seem to be up for grabs, it is especially important for academics to reach diverse audiences with evidenced-based work. How can and should German Studies matter beyond the GSA? This seminar seeks to explore the challenges and opportunities for students and scholars of German Studies to speak to broader publics. Organized as a workshop, this seminar will examine different modes of public engagement across different media forms. Equal parts media training and critical analysis of new and legacy media, its goal is to explore how scholars and students of German Studies might better access and shape public conversations around contemporary issues. To that end, it aims to cultivate among participants 1) a toolkit of skills with which to join those conversations; and 2) the beginnings of a network of like-minded collaborators and practical connections to help facilitate such public engagement. 

 

07. “Entanglements and Separations”: German Histories since 1945 (in-person seminar)

5 spots for auditors

Conveners:

Abstract:

2020 marks thirty years of German reunification after forty-five years of division. In the 1980s, prior to reunification, historian Christoph Klessmann observed that the historiographies of the Federal Republic of Germany in the West and the German Democratic Republic in the East had remained largely separated. He proposed instead to approach contemporary German history from the perspective of “entanglement and separation.” More than thirty years after German reunification, historians and cultural studies scholars are starting to take up Klessmann’s call to write integrated histories of both Germanys after 1945. In addition, historians such as Konrad H. Jarausch have called for writing post-1989 historical narratives of a reunified Germany. This seminar will bring together scholars from a range of fields and academic ranks (graduate students, junior faculty, and senior faculty) to interrogate the utility of the concept of “entanglement and separation” and discuss new methods and approaches to writing integrated German histories.

 

08. The German Body and Self in Global Circuits of Knowledge and Practice, 1700-1945 (Sponsored by the Body Studies Network) (virtual seminar)

6 spots for auditors

Conveners:

Abstract:

This seminar focuses on the body as a nexus for exploring the ways the German self was defined in global circuits (Treitel) between 1700-1945. The interaction between Germany and the world was not linear but circular. We ask: how the global circuits of knowledge and practices defined the German body and self. Building on the existing work by historians, literary scholars, visual culture scholars on the global (Tautz, Hong) and the body (Dickinson, Zimmerman, Hau, George). We bring these diverse bodies of scholarship together focusing on the intersection of the body, self, and global. We invite scholars who are working on dance, sports, medicine, and sex as they appear in the movement of ideas, exchange of goods, journeys of people or literary and visual representations of race, the others or the exotic. We interrogate anthropological examinations of the self in science, philosophy, theology/religion, framed by imperial, medical, missionary projects. 

 

09. German Parliamentary Democracy in Transition (Sponsored by the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst) (in-person seminar)

5 spots for auditors

Conveners:

Abstract:

German parliamentary democracy is under pressure. Common political practices have come under scrutiny, not least since the rise of the right-wing populist AfD. These challenges have recently come to a head during the Covid-19 crisis when protests against an alleged power shift to the executive were heard both inside and outside the parliamentary arena. Yet calls for reforming German democracy are more widespread. After three decades of democratic reform at the local level, there are renewed calls for democratic innovations at the federal level, most recently evidenced by the proposal to introduce direct democratic instruments in federal politics at the Green party convention. The seminar takes these developments as a point of departure to discuss the state of German parliamentary democracy with a particular focus on the most recent developments and possible future avenues for German parliamentary democracy after the 2021 federal election. 

 

11. Green Frankfurt School (virtual seminar)

6 spots for auditors

Conveners:

Abstract:

This seminar explores the contributions of Frankfurt School critical theory to discourses of the environmental humanities. We are interested in the ecological implications of the key texts and authors (Benjamin, Kracauer, Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse, Habermas, Honneth, Jaeggi), their philosophical interlocutors (Kant, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Weber), as well as critical responses by associated writers and filmmakers such as Hannah Arendt, Hans-Magnus Enzensberger, Angela Davis, Susan Neiman, Alexander Kluge, Jennifer Baichwal, Susan Buck-Morss, Miriam Hansen, Nicolas Born, Kelly Reichardt, Bruno Latour, and Judith Butler. Possible topics include representations and aesthetics of the environment, the traumatization of nature in the Anthropocene, environmental racism, human rights and climate refugees, ecofeminism, and the tensions between deep and social ecology, constructivism, natural history, and environmental ethics. We are interested in a broad range of philosophical approaches as well as engagements with artistic and media practices such as literature, film, poetry, music, theater, and digital culture.

 

 

13. Literature as Medium of Positive Emotions (in-person seminar)

6 spots for auditors

Conveners:

Abstract:

We will examine how narratives and fiction induce positive emotions and feelings in audiences. These feelings can, but do not have to match the feelings of characters in the text. Emotions are central to motivating engagement in reading literature, structure the narrative arch, and lead to better memory, but also remain poorly understood. While emotions have become more prevalent in research in the past decades, the focus tends to be on negative or ugly feelings (Ngai). The implicit understanding seems to be that positive emotions are either false (Adorno) or lack complexity. We wish to challenge this understanding and discuss the role literature plays in creating, cultivating, and sustaining positive emotions now and in the past. We will discuss 1. specific texts and genres, such as the Idylle; 2. effects of literature, such as being moved, joy, and empathy; and 3. theoretical debates about the place of literature in life.

 

14. The Nazi Legacy: Reconstruction Efforts and Memory Projects since 1945 (virtual seminar)

4 spots for auditors

Conveners:

Abstract:

This seminar provides a forum for exchange of ideas between scholars in all disciplines working on recovery, reorientation, and memory in Germany, Austria, or Nazi-occupied areas after 1945. We encourage participation of scholars at all levels (incl. graduate students) who investigate new avenues of research, especially those with multidisciplinary approaches that challenge traditional interpretations. Seminar discussion will revolve around three common themes: “political cleansing”; “reshaping society after fascism”; and “memory and forgetting.” Through shared readings and discussion of ongoing or newly initiated projects, seminars participants will explore the complex, often fraught relationship between punitive vs rehabilitative actions, collective vs individual accountability, and private vs. public expression or concealment. We will also consider political, economic, social, cultural, and emotional perspectives on legacies of Nazi dictatorship and wartime occupation. Possible topics include the function/effects of denazification; law and justice; reeducation; guilt/accountability; economic development; cultural forms; memory culture; race, gender and sexuality.

 

15. The New Media of Migration (virtual seminar)

6 spots for auditors

Conveners:

Abstract:

This seminar will investigate the re/presentational modes of global forced migration within the aesthetic, sociopolitical, and technological aspects of the new millennium. Since the turn of the century, artists, activists, humanitarian organizations, and production companies in Germany have turned to New Media to communicate the journey of millions fleeing war-torn regions of the Middle East, Africa, and Asia. Mobilizing emergent digital modalities and digital infrastructures, they cultivate a new aesthetic that complicates popular associations with forced migration. Through analysis of smartphone footage, film essays, gallery installations, video games, and social media, this seminar engages questions such as: What role does German/national and collaborative/transnational cultural production play in global forced migration? How do New Media forms recalibrate traditional discourses of forced migration? How does the transdisciplinary nature of New Media help develop new methodologies for approaching the issues of forced migration? We hope to publish papers emerging from this seminar in Konturen. 

 

17. Performing Exile: Performance and the History of Jewish Refugees from Nazi Europe (virtual seminar)

5 spots for auditors

Conveners:

Abstract:

This seminar provides a forum for collaboration between scholars in all disciplines working on migration, exile, and displacement from Nazi Europe. It seeks more nuanced alternatives to complicate older paradigms that emphasize such dynamics as Americanization and unidirectional assimilation into host-countries, and focus on the success or failure of well-known individuals. This seminar engages with works that consider: • Performance Studies as a lens for thinking about migration • Global and transnational perspectives • Relations between Jewish and non-Jewish Refugees • Gender and Exile • The persistence of interwar Central European influences • Remigration to postwar Europe. Ultimately, this seminar encourages participants to think about how refugees reimagined their identities as Europeans and/or Jews through various cultural and political practices. We encourage graduate students and younger scholars to apply and we aim to promote interdisciplinary discussion.

 

 

19. Problems of Linguistic Indifference in German Studies (virtual seminar)

6 spots for auditors

Conveners:

Abstract:

The various disciplines that comprise German Studies face options as to how and whether they will recognize the role of language(s) in the bearing of their inquiries. A novel can be analyzed without regard for the linguistic contexts of its production and reception, history can be presented without attention to the linguistic discourses and communicative media that facilitated or deterred transformations, and entire curricula can in fact be shaped around culture or tradition with only an ancillary role foreseen for language(s). There is, perhaps, good reason for scholars or curriculum-makers to be somehow indifferent to language(s): Languages complicate matters. And yet, the added complexity that attention to language, language variation, and translation bring ought to be a central tenet in a linguistically delineated field like German Studies. This seminar is therefore devoted to exploring the analytical, conceptual, and pragmatic consequences of linguistic indifference, and the critical potential of choosing otherwise. 

 

20. Resonance in Art, Film, Literature, Music, and Theory (virtual seminar)

            1 spot for auditor

Conveners:

Abstract:

Resonance is a deeply ambivalent concept. In the natural sciences, it explains the causal impact of an object’s vibrations onto another object. In the wake of eighteenth-century aesthetics, we on the other hand also employ the term to identify relationships for which we cannot name exact causes—the (un)logic of affects and empathetic excitations that exceed predictability. In spite of different meanings, however, the concept of resonance privileges ideas of proximity and contiguity, the co-dependence of subject and object, forms of reciprocity that are often (falsely) believed to elude mediation. In this seminar, we explore the role and usefulness of resonance as a category of aesthetic analysis and theory. Seminar participants investigate the extent to which resonance offers a viable concept to examine various artistic mediums and their impact on readers, viewers, and listeners. The seminar will also discuss the relation of “resonant criticism” to other frameworks of cultural inquiry.

 

21. Sexuality and the Law in German-speaking Europe (virtual seminar)

2 spots for auditors

Conveners:

Abstract:

The seminar seeks to bring together scholars from a range of fields – including but not limited to the history of sexuality, gender studies, queer studies, critical legal studies, and legal history – who research the ways in which sexuality and the legal order have intersected, come into conflict, and mutually influenced each other in German-speaking Europe since the early modern era. The seminar proposes to examine both the effects of repressive laws – such as those criminalizing homosexuality, abortion, or interracial sexual relations,– on people’s sexual lives, and the potentially empowering function of law, as in the case of legislation to punish violence against women, or laws banning discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. More generally, the seminar is interested in exploring the myriad ways in which the study of sexuality and legal studies can be brought into fruitful conversation. We encourage scholars in different disciplines and career stages to participate.

 

22. Sister Insider: Intersectional Collaborations on the Uses of Anger by Women of Color (virtual seminar)

6 spots for auditors

Conveners:

Abstract:

In her 1981 essay “The Uses of Anger,” Audre Lorde wrote “My response to racism is anger. I have lived with that anger, on that anger, beneath that anger, on top of that anger, ignoring that anger, feeding upon that anger, learning to use that anger before it laid my visions to waste, for most of my life.” This seminar revisits Audre Lorde’s work to discuss female expressions of anger as responses to racism and misogyny in the German-speaking world since the 1980s. The organizers will work to ensure a space to facilitate respectful dialogue so that participants can speak freely and form cross-disciplinary coalitions through intellectual exchange. We will discuss and explore innovative approaches to anger, e.g. humor, and identify which forms of anger feminist scholars may wish to nurture and develop to effectively respond to racism and misogyny in the academy as well as in their personal lives. 

 

24. Theory of Number (in-person seminar)

5 spots for auditors

Conveners:

Abstract:

The culture of number and quantity now dominates our institutions, including universities. The era of “big data” and computing have changed both the culture and understanding of number. Quality and quantity seem permanently intertwined. This seminar draws upon the German tradition’s unique resources and brings together scholars interested in the theory of number. Beginning with the classical metaphysical tradition (Plato and Euclid) informing modern attempts to conceptualize number, day two focuses on the German Enlightenment (Leonhard Euler’s and Johann Lambert’s crucial contributions to the integration of mathematics and the technical disciplines). We conclude with the revolution in the philosophy of arithmetic that led to the digital era (include the debate between Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell on the completeness of the a priori rules of mathematics). Our goal: to develop a framework for understanding the theory of number to facilitate historical and philological work on critical problems in the present.

  

 

26. Tradition and Discontinuity: The Early Modern Period as Solitary Era (virtual seminar)

6 spots for auditors

Conveners:

Abstract:

The Early Modern Period has been recognized as a transition period for ancient and medieval traditions (Hoefele/Mueller/Oesterreicher 2013). However, many of the earlier traditions this period adopted were later denied by subsequent eras. Conversely, the Early Modern Period was also one of innovation; it established entirely new literary genres (e.g., utopian literature, journalism) and operated as a staging ground for the “new science” (Bacon, Descartes, Leibniz). Is the Early Modern Period a final stage or a new beginning, or is it perhaps neither? Participants in this seminar will continue the ongoing debates on the "legitimacy of the Modern Age“ (Blumenberg) and will question the supposedly regressive character of early modern literature (Schlaffer) and its liminal classification (Foucault). The seminar seeks to query ways in which the Early Modern Period created new forms of thinking and writing that neither emanated from antiquity and the Medieval Ages nor continued after 1750 and to discuss the status of the Early Modern Period as “solitary era” and its academic value in German Studies.

 

27. Transnational Germans: Local Actors and Global Spaces, Global Actors and Local Spaces (virtual seminar)

4 spots for auditors

Conveners:

Abstract:

This seminar will explore the theoretical, methodological, and empirical aspects and challenges that come with the transnational turn in German historiography and German studies. In particular, it will examine the significance of that transnational turn for the study of ‘German’ migrants and ‘German’ minorities. While shifting notions of ‘Germanness’ form a focal point in scholarship, we seek a far broader approach to this topic by bringing together scholars who work on different case studies and address issues related to ‘German’ migrants and ‘German’ minorities from decidedly transnational perspectives. We encourage a strongly comparative discussion that bridges any divisions between German ‘economic’ migrants, political émigrés, the ‘German’ historical diaspora in Central and Eastern Europe, ‘German expellees’ and others. The project conducted at the Ruhr University Bochum on postwar Danube Swabian ‘expellee’ migrations to France and Brazil, out of which this proposal emerged, provides just one example of the entangled and shifting character of ‘German’ identifications beyond the German nation-state. By foregrounding transnational comparative approaches, with examples from different geographies and in different timeframes, the seminar will illuminate both specific case studies and broader issues of transnational German identifications.

 

28. Women’s Drama and Theatre in German (virtual seminar)

6 spots for auditors

Conveners:

Abstract:

Around 1800, the producer (or, author) and literary/stage protagonist (or, hero) came to be invariably coded as bourgeois middle class, white and male, whereas women received the part of actresses and translators. This gender dichotomy in the perception of male vs. female productivity kept shaping traditional approaches to drama and theatre across the ages, from late medieval well into the 20th century, reaching into our present. This seminar aims at revisiting and contextualizing womens dramatic texts and theatrical activities in German-language Europe across the ages, bringing to light women’s agency and significance within an over 500-year-long period by means of taking a transcultural, post-national and intersectional approach. The seminar forms part of a new larger project dedicated to a comprehensive Handbook, under review for a SSHRC Insight Grant. It wants to discuss how feminist scholarship in drama and theatre towards the production of the Handbook best proceed.