Through many successive generations – among them what might well have been the most significant one shaped by German-Jewish émigrés from Oskar Seidlin to Henry Remak in the postwar era – this mission found renewal and support in the experience, knowledge and dedication of successive generations of faculty and students. We should not take it for granted that it will live on. While we experience the relevance of what we teach and research on a daily basis in the classroom, in conversations and at conferences, this experience falls on deaf ears as soon as it leaves these narrowly circumscribed venues. It seems all the more important to recognize the achievements of our students and colleagues.

Our faculty affirms its leading position in the field. Michel Chaouli’s book Something Speaks to Me: Where Criticism Begins has been published with the University of Chicago Press last spring. The book is a deep meditation on what it means to encounter an artwork, to be struck by it and to be at a loss about how to talk about this encounter. He has been invited to present his book by Maggie Nelson, Merve Emre and other luminaries of humanities research and writing. With its fresh insights, the book will remain a companion for years to come. Teresa Kovacs’s book Theatre of the Void: Plasticity, Hauntology, and Nuclear Blast is under contract with Cornell University Press, and the German version is going into print as I write with Theater der Zeit. It will bring recent theater and performance into a new perspective and into conversation with the finest research traditions in Europe and the US. Fritz Breithaupt, who won the Austrian Book prize last year, expects the English edition of his book to be published with Yale University Press in early 2025, after the Spanish version has been reviewed in El Mundo and El País. Chris Sapp and Rex Sprouse have started their research project, supported by a National Science Foundation Grant, that will make it easier to study how the German language has evolved over the past 900 years. And please don’t expect us to stop here.

It is noteworthy that after ten years at the head of the Institute of German Studies, I have passed the baton to Teresa Kovacs, and we all look forward to her energy and creativity in this leadership position.

Our graduate program remains a stable cornerstone of our department. Our students develop innovative projects, they present at conferences, and they still find jobs, though not always tenure-track positions. They have been successful in securing funding from outside and inside the department for their dissertation work, a testament to the high quality of their dissertation projects: Katharina Schmid-Schmidsfelden and Jane Harris have each been awarded one of the highly competitive College of Arts and Sciences’ Dissertation Completion Fellowships to continue working on their dissertations. And Cynthia Shin has been awarded the Oskar Seidlin Dissertation Writing Fellowship.  In addition, Lee Czerw has been awarded a FLAS fellowship to continue learning Yiddish while writing his dissertation on the sovereign in love in seventeenth century literature.

We continued our exchange with the University of Vienna last June when Teresa Kovacs and I traveled with five graduate students – Cynthia Shin, David Gould, Luke Rylander, Katharina Schmid-Schmidsfelden, and Lee Czerw – to a two-day long workshop on the topic “Gegenrede” in the Austrian capital. They presented alongside students from Vienna, and I was impressed with the high quality of the work and by the discussions that we carried with us into the late night. Our generous host Burkhardt Wolf had invited the writer Josef Winkler, whose reading “Wenn wir den Himmel sehen wollen, müssen wir donnern helfen” exemplified forms of resistance to the narrow-minded region of provenance Kärnten in an enjoyable event.

I was delighted to welcome a new cohort of graduate students to the department and look forward to seeing them grow as scholars and as human beings: Bradley Weiss has joined us on the linguistics and philology track from the University of Texas at Austin, and two students are coming to our literature and culture track, Lily Myers, who obtained a BA in German and Dance from the University of Alaska and Manuela di Lisa, who joined us with a BA from the University of Basel in Switzerland.  In addition, Britt Zeldenrust, who completed a degree at the State University of New York at Buffalo and whose interests are in German philosophy has joined the Department of Comparative Literature as a recipient of one of our recruitment fellowships.

Several of our students have accepted positions after the completion of their PhD: Elijah Peters has returned to his alma mater, Arizona State University, as Student Success and Engagement Coordinator. And Elliott Evans has accepted the position of Postdoctoral Researcher on a National Science Foundation grant. Following the defense of her dissertation, Kathy Hrach received a postdoctoral grant from the Austrian National Science Foundation. And Nina Morais (as some of you might have read in our last Newsletter in her own words) joined Rhodes College in the Modern Languages and Literatures Department as a Visiting Assistant Professor of German.

I am proud of the vitality of our undergraduate program. With the University of Michigan and the University of Wisconsin, we are leading nation-wide in the number of enrolled students and in the quality of our program. Although our department has not been immune to national trends and has lost enrollment, the loss is less dramatic compared to many other institutions. Above all, however, the intellectual breadth and strength of our majors and minors is impressive.  The quality of our program is confirmed by awards our students have won. Ethan Walsh and Abigail Hooks were inducted to the prestigious national honor society Phi Beta Kappa, the oldest national honor society in the United States, founded in 1776, that counts luminaries such as Theodore Roosevelt and Ralph Waldo Emerson among its members. And many undergraduate students have won departmental prizes: On the basis of their exceptional merit as students of Germanic Studies, Cathlene Horwege, Jens Hinniger, and Carissa Yu were awarded the Urfer Award for Germanic Studies. The E.O. Wooley Scholarship went to Emma Prohl, who has also served as president of our German Club. We are also proud to celebrate achievements in the study of Norwegian, Justin Burrell and Allison Kobialka were awarded the Curtis N. Knudsen Memorial Scholarship. And we were delighted to learn about the research of Ethan Walsh, whose honors thesis traced the emergence of the right-wing party AfD under the guidance of Ben Robinson.

Together with the music community, we mourn the passing of our alumnus and colleague Julie Lawson. We are grateful for her accomplishments and her service to the university community. After retiring from Northern Virginia Community College Georgetown University's continuing education program, she joined her alma mater in 2004 to teach as lecturer in our department as well as in the music school. We will miss her warmth and her thoughtful presence. Tom King and music students performed in her honor at our last year end reception last April.

I also want to thank Maria “Masha” Cherkassova, who has been named honorary citizen in recognition of her devotion to the life of our department. And our tireless administrators Jill Giffin and Sara Goodwin, whose presence is essential to everything we do. 

Let me end with an invitation: we will celebrate the 140^th anniversary of the department at our year-end reception on 6 PM Friday, April 25 in the Cook Center. It will follow a lecture at 4 PM. Mark your calendar!

Johannes Türk