The Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures is excited to host two excellent speakers for this year's second installation of our Graduate Student/Faculty Colloquium Series. Please join us next week on Tuesday, October 14th at 9 a.m. in the Max Kade Center at 3401 Walnut Street. A continental breakfast will be served at 8:45 a.m.

 

Our two speakers are Dr. Cordula Grewe of the Department of Art History and Archeology at Columbia University and Josef Nothmann, a Penn PhD student in European History.

 

Below are the descriptions of the papers--we hope that you can join us! 

 

A Massachusetts Yankee in Queen Angie's Court: Reflections on a Fellowship in the Bundestag and Contemporary German Parliamentary-Political Culture

Josef Nothmann, PhD Student in European History, University of Pennsylvania

 

From March through July 2014 I was an International Parliamentary Fellow of the German Bundestag, working in the office of Doris Barnett (SPD) and participating in a wide-ranging program organized by the Bundestag and the three major Berlin universities in collaboration with Germany's six political foundations. In this presentation I will discuss the program and its participants (120 from 31 countries), my experiences with the SPD both in Berlin and in Frau Barnett's constituency in Ludwigshafen, and my impressions of parties and parliamentary culture in the Federal Republic. I will also analyze the potential rewards and pitfalls of the program and the status of the transatlantic relationship in the era of TTIP and Snowden. I will argue from my experiences for the relevance of politics for the humanities and the need for a mutual program of enlightenment if the growing transatlantic cultural and institutional divide is to be bridged.

 

Lady Sherman’s Attitudes

Dr. Cordula Grewe, Columbia University

 

The nexus of appropriation and performativity characterizing Cindy Sherman’s photographs is arearticulation of the attitude tradition pioneered by Lady Hamilton. This proposition takes us back to the 18th century, an era famously obsessed with resolving once and for all the age-old paragonedebate by delineating the nature and proper borders of the various arts. Yet this aesthetic border work was challenged by the rise of two para-artistic genres, the attitude and tableau vivant, that were multisensory, multimedia and precariously positioned between amateur and avant-garde practice. Acted out in sequence, often framed by text, and frequently accompanied by music, the performed sculptures of the attitudes and the staged pictures of the tableauxvivants eroded the dominant paragone model. Exploring this erosion, the talk proposes a genealogy from the extended understanding of media and identity formation in Hamilton’s performances to Sherman’s postmodern photography.

 

Please email the colloquium coordinator, Didem Uca (uca@sas.upenn.edu), with any questions, requests for special accommodation, or if you would like to present at another colloquium. (And keep November18th open for our next colloquium!)