Fritz Breithaupt

2024 has been a tumultuous year that saw me travel to many places, spanning several continents, for lectures and workshops. This included my first trip to Japan at the German Japanese Institute and the Kyoto Institute for Philosophy. I also spent some time at The New Institute in Hamburg and will spend more time there in 2025. As of February 2025, my book The Narrative Brain is available and a new book will come out at Suhrkamp in September (in German first). In the new book, I will tackle the concept of experience, especially first-time experiences. I continue my work in the Experimental Humanities Lab to complement close readings of literary texts with large-scale empirical and experimental studies.

Irit Dekel

My 2024 was full and fulfilling!

As faculty in both Germanic Studies and the Borns Jewish Studies Program, I divided my time between teaching, addressing questions related to the war in the Middle East and how it affected our conversations in Bloomington, as well as Jewish experience in Germany. I participated in conversations in Israel about the language of the war, and published a piece “There were Booms” Israel Studies in Language and Society  special issue on Speaking after October 7.

My co-edited volume The Routledge Handbook of Memory Activism published in 2023 received many positive reactions. Most exciting, I completed my second monograph Witnessing Positions: Jews, Memories and Minorities in Contemporary Germany. In summer 2024 I co-organized a second DAAD International workshop in Cambridge University, inviting IU Graduate Students and faculty. 

I also participated in a National Endowment for the Humanities [NEH] Summer Institute for Higher Education as Faculty, titled "Content Warning: Engaging Trauma and Controversy in Research Collections”, at Indiana University in July 2024.

Lastly, I will be Institute for Advanced Study, Indiana University Bloomington Spring 2025 Residential Fellow.

Günther Jikeli

Katharina Soemer, a visiting scholar in 2022 in Germanic Studies and an active member of IU’s Research Lab Social Media & Hate, organized the third International Datathon & Machine Learning Competition this fall in close collaboration with Germanic Studies faculty Günther Jikeli. The focus of this year's competition was on antisemitism before and after October 7, 2023. The program challenges high school and college students worldwide to enhance their media literacy and create innovative methods for analyzing online content. Previous participants have developed machine learning techniques, established working definitions of bias against various marginalized groups, and connected with like-minded peers globally. The winning teams will be announced in early December 2024.

Teresa Kovacs

The academic year 2023/24 has been a rich and fulfilling one for me, and I am pleased to share with you some of the highlights of the past year, including my own research, teaching, and other activities: Last year, I completed my book manuscript Theater of the Void: Plasticity, Hauntology, and Nuclear Blast, which will be published by Cornell University Press in 2025. The book will also be published in German (Theater der Leere. Heiner Müller, Elfriede Jelinek, Christoph Schlingensief, René Pollesch) by Theater der Zeit any week now. And although the last months of working on a book can be hard and lonely, I was lucky enough to be invited to the Université de Strasbourg and the Deutsches Haus at NYU to present parts of my book. In addition to my book project, I published two articles and engaged with colleagues in inspiring workshops and seminars at Indiana University and beyond. 

The highlight of my teaching year was the work with Berlin-based director Jürgen Kuttner, whose visit was incorporated into my graduate class and one of my undergraduate classes on “Wounded Heroes”. Kuttner staged Brecht’s adaptation of Lenz’s Der Hofmeister with us; the way we approached our performance was also very much inspired by Brecht, meaning that the rehearsal and everything we learned as we stepped in and out of the different positions we found in the text was central. The result of this intellectual work was reflected in the performance and in a roundtable with faculty and graduate students that followed the performance. For a more detailed reflection on this project, please read Cynthia Shin’s excellent essay published in the electronic communications of the International Brecht Society. In addition, students in my GER-421 “Literature and the Climate Crisis” class organized a thought-provoking, well-attended event at a local bookstore, Redbud Books, where they presented not only their own research but also their own performative works.

Finally, I would like to mention that last academic year we launched a Theatre and Performance Working Group, which has just received further funding from the IAS and will initially include thirteen faculty from nine different departments as well as graduate students working on theatre and performance. I am also fortunate to have become part of the Environmental Futures in the Arts and Humanities Network in addition to this group, which is another source of inspiration for my work.

Gergana May, Norwegian program

It has been a good year for the Norwegian program. In Spring 2024 I taught The Multicultural North course to forty curious undergraduates, and this fall am offering again my 100 level Gen-Ed class surveying Scandinavian culture - with sixty students enrolled. The language classes are also full and - for the first time!! – one of them is taught by a Germanic Studies Associate Instructor, a student who has been trained by the program and now teaches Norwegian instead of German! Yay! Great job, Mary Gilbert! We plan to repeat this next fall with another Associate Instructor - I am truly elated that some of our graduate students can add teaching Norwegian to their resume. In other news, last fall we had an exciting installment of the Scandinavian Lecture Series by hosting Maxine Savage, a Doctoral Student in Scandinavian Studies from the University of Washington, Seattle who gave a talk on the 1905 Danish Colonial Exhibition in Copenhagen's Tivoli Gardens. I am currently researching three potential speakers for our Spring 2025 instalment of the series. Stay tuned!

Ben Robinson

Coming off a year of post-chair sabbatical (’23-’24), I’m happy to be back in the thick of teaching this academic year. Of course, the situation on our campus (and on campuses nationally) couldn’t be more fraught, with our upper leadership continuing to demonstrate its destructive contempt for the liberality of the sciences and arts. I won’t go into the gruesome detail here, but for those interested, please see a guest post I wrote for the blog of the AAUP’s Academe magazine.

I spent my sabbatical year in Bloomington writing the first 4 chapters of my book on indexes. The section I worked on aims to crack out the key term of the book from the most formal spot of modern philosophy, logic. What I ended up working on is an account of the difference between traditional syllogistic logic and modern formal logic as it emerged from roughly the middle of the 19th century until it was canonized in first-order form about a hundred years later in the middle of the 20th century. The Germanic Studies angle comes from the key role played in this development by Gottlob Frege, Ernst Schröder, and David Hilbert. I argue that in the midst of this epic formalization process, a crucial element of the ad hoc remains in logic, which I tie back across the divide to Aristotle’s perplexingly undefined starting point in a “certain this.” For what it’s worth, I find the persistence of that this consoling.

One way to think about this is by analogy with a kind of indexing more familiar to us book-readers in the humanities, namely, the back-of-the-book index. What is so versatile about an index, in distinction to a table of contents, is that the index is arbitrary with respect to the contents of a given book. It simply links an alphabetic to a numeric code. These linked codes, while powerful, tell us little. Rather, we find the content we’re after by following a delicate thread that spans from a letter to a number. The important thing is that an index is a direct link not mediated already by what we still want to know. Why is this interesting? It suggests that even where the scope of our generalization is at its widest, our knowledge depends on a connection particular to where we stand.

I like to think of this in terms of Walt Whitman’s noiseless spider, who the poet observes on an isolated promontory patiently casting thread after thread “till the bridge you will need be form’d, till the ductile anchor hold.”

Chris Sapp

This has been an eventful year in Germanic Linguistics and Philology! Tracy, Lane, and I hosted the Germanic Linguistics Annual Conference (GLAC) in April. This was the third edition of GLAC in Bloomington, but my first time organizing it. On Thursday, April 25, we held a full-day symposium on Germanic philology and historical linguistics in honor of Kari, with papers by Kari’s colleagues on the skaldic project (Tarrin Wills and Diana Whaley) and her former students (Mary Gilbert, Jane Harris, John Sundquist, and Klaus Johan Myrvoll). Rob Fulk delivered a wonderful keynote on the ins and outs of editing skaldic poetry, giving us all a deeper appreciation of Kari’s scholarship. We ended the day with a special edition of the Saga Reading Group (Þing) at Rob’s home; with many alumni in attendance, we dubbed this one the Alþing.

GLAC continued for two more days, with 55 papers, as well as plenaries by Joe Salmons and Ulrike Demske. We were pleased to hear about the research of our alumni, including David Bolter, Elliott Evans, Megan Hartman, Stephen Hopkins, Andrew Kostakis, Rachel Lulich, Erin Noelliste, and Dorian Roehrs. This was also an opportunity for several current graduate students to present (Sofiya Bodnar, Elaine Dalida, Janine Emerson, John Paul Ewing, and Daniel Mitropolous), some of them giving their very first conference paper. Thanks to Tracy, Lane, Jill, Sara, and all of the graduate students who helped with the organization.

On the research side, Rex Sprouse, Elliott Evans, and our team of graduate assistants continue annotating texts for the Indiana Parsed Corpus of Historical High German. One year into our 3-year grant from the National Science Foundation, we have 56 of the planned 165 texts annotated and published to our website (ipchg.iu.edu); these are mostly early modern texts but we have just started adding some Middle High German. Although we haven’t quite completed a third of the corpus, we are getting faster and feel like we are on track to finish by the end of 2026. We’ve already published 2 articles on the mechanics of constructing the corpus, and we have given several conference presentations using data harvested from the texts that we’ve annotated so far.

Lane Sorensen, GFTP Director

We had the pleasure of hosting the 11^th annual IU German Film and Theater Project on Friday, April 12^th, 2024. Eight high school German programs (Columbus North, Columbus East, Edgewood, Fishers, Northwestern, Jay County, and William Henry Harrison) participated in the film festival this year, and we are delighted to say that the number of participants at the in-person event reached pre-pandemic levels: 81 visitors from six of the above mentioned high schools and 12 helpers (IU Germanic Studies faculty, staff and students) for a total of 93 attendees who came together for German-themed workshops, swag, food, fun, film festival and prizes!

Best Comedy was awarded to William Henry Harrison High School for Der Stumme Showdown, a silent film that became not so silent with a hilarious plot and fantastic effects. Best Drama then went to Edgewood High School for Fairy Tale Balanced, a story that had us see things from the ever-misunderstood wolf’s point of view. And finally, the Audience Choice Award was presented to Northwestern High School for Kleine Schwester, an absurdist’s dream parody of Big Brother that had us all wide-eyed and in stitches by the end.

A big shout-out goes to all who made this possible: our workshop presenters Sofiya Bodnar, Susanne Even, Nikole Langjahr, Anna Spafford, and Claire Woodward, as well as to our helpers Luke Rylander, Jenn Strayer, Lanre Okuseinde, Mascha Cherkassova, Jill Giffin, Sara Goodwin, Jeff Holdeman, and Johannes Türk ... vielen herzlichen Dank! 

Johannes Türk

During my first year as chair of the department, I also continued at the head of the Institute of Germanic Studies, and the double service burden left me little room for my own projects. Nevertheless I found the time to travel to the annual meeting of the German Studies Association in Montréal, where I presented a paper on idyll and bureaucracy in Adalbert Stifter’s Nachsommer. And in March I participated in a colloquium organized by Hélène Merlin-Kajman and the Mouvement Transition at the Sorbonne-Nouvelle in Paris devoted to the topic of inheriting that brought together scholars from universities across the world. My presentation was on the inheritance of inconsolability. At the department, the highlight of this past year for me was the stay of our Distinguished Max Kade Visiting Professor, the philosopher Wolfram Eilenberger, who reminded us of the importance of thinking as a liberating act.