Professor Ian Thomas Fleishman's article "The Rustle of the Anthropocene: Kafka's Odradek as Ecocritical Icon" has been published in the current issue of The Germanic Review.

New York, NY – 6 December 2016 – The Modern Language Association of America today announced it is awarding its eighth Fenia and Yaakov Leviant Memorial Prize in Yiddish Studies for an outstanding scholarly work in English in the field of Yiddish to Kathryn Hellerstein, of the University of Pennsylvania, for A Question of Tradition: Women Poets in Yiddish, 1586–1987, published by Stanford University Press. Jan Schwarz, of Lund University, Sweden, will receive an honorable mention for Survivors and Exiles: Yiddish Culture after the Holocaust, published by Wayne State University Press. The prize is awarded each even-numbered year and is awarded alternately to an outstanding translation of a Yiddish literary work and to an outstanding scholarly work in English in the field of Yiddish.

AAUSC 2016 Volume - Issues in Language Program Direction: The Interconnected Language Curriculum: Critical Transitions and Interfaces in Articulated K-16 Contexts; Per Urlaub, Johanna Watzinger-Tharp, Editors.

Tom Tearney, a fifth year PhD student, will serve for the second time as graduate student advisor and supervisor for the Bassini Jewish Studies Internship Program at Penn.

Liliane Weissberg has recently been appointed a founding member of the board of the Research Center Sanssouci for the Study of the Enlightenment.

Liliane Weissberg has just returned from the RWTH Aachen where she was DAAD Visiting Professor in German-Jewish Studies and taught in the Departments of German, English, and Political Science.

Didem Uca, a fifth year graduate student, has received a Fulbright Research Fellowship at the Humboldt University of Berlin's Institut fur deutsche Literatur for the 2016-2017 academic year.

Penn Graduate Student Sonia Gollance will spend ten months conducting research and participating in a seminar at the Center for Jewish History (New York) as a 2016-2017 Sophie Bookhalter Fellow in Jewish Culture.

Claudia Lynn and Sibel Sayili-Hurley have won the 2016 PLC Best Project Prize for their work on a new textbook for German 104, entitled "Bewegungen". The project was made possible by a language grant from the Penn Language Center and the support of the German Department.

Bethany Wiggin, associate professor of Germanic languages and literatures and the founding director of the Penn Program in Environmental Humanities, is among the first recipients of a Whiting Public Engagement Fellowship from the Whiting Foundation.