With the end of the academic year, news and events will be on hold until August 2011. Click here for a recap of the goings-ons in the German Department for the academic year 2010/2011.

It's been a big year for Penn German. Below are some of the highlights of the Academic Year 2010 to 2011.

• Penn German hosted (or helped host) a handful of conferences:

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    Simon Richter, Eric Jarosinski, Nele Bemong, and Amy Tanguay organized Graphic Exchanges: Comics Without Borders, which featured readings by the comic novelists Charles Burns and Marc Legendre.

  • Katie Malczyk co-organized the Medievalists @ Penn conference "Mater(ia) Familias: Family Matters," with keynote speaker Ann Marie Rasmussen (Duke)

  • Catriona MacLeod, Bethany Wiggin, Nick Theis, and Dan DiMassa organized an epic conference "Un/Translatables: an interdisciplinary conference on questions of translatability across Germanic languages and cultures." The three-day conference included, among many other highlights, readings by the German-Japanese poet Yoko Tawada and a workshop on translation by Tawada's English translator Susan Bernofsky

  • Bridget Swanson and Amy Tanguay hosted the graduate conference "'Round and 'Round We Go: The Endless Carnival," with a keynote address by Katrin Sieg (Georgetown).

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    Liliane Weissberg and Melanie Adley curated the exhibition "The Wolf Man Paints!" a multi-media instalation featuring drawings and paintings by Sigmund Freud's famous patient Sergius Pankejeff.

  • Melanie Adley organized "Future / No Future: An Interdisciplinary Graduate Student Conference on the Future of Gender and Sexuality Studies" with keynote speaker Lisa Duggan (NYU)

• Three recent PhDs landed positions:

  • Michael Ryan: two-year ACLS New Faculty Fellowship as visiting assistant professor in German Studies and Comparative Literature at Duke University.

  • Chris Schnader: Lecturer in Foreign Language (career track), Swarthmore College.

  •  Kerry Wallach, Assistant Professor (tenure track), Gettysburg College.

• Katie Malczyk put together the German Faculty/Graduate Colloquium, and Melanie Adley and Caroline Weist co-founded the Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies monthly graduate student colloquium.

• Four graduate students defended dissertations: 

  • Alexander Pichugin, "Naturbeziehung und Ökologie im Werk von Ernst Kreuder."

  • Chris Schnader, "Like a Friend: Friedrich Schiller and the Aesthetics of Friendship."

  •  Mara Taylor, “Diagnosing Deviants: The Figure of the Lesbian in Sexological and Literary Discourses 1860-1931."

  • Kerry Wallach, “Observable Type: Jewish Women and the Jewish Press in Weimar Germany.”