Irit Dekel

2024-2025 was a productive and exciting year for me!

I completed the work on my second monograph Witnessing Positions: Jews, Memories and Minorities in Contemporary Germany, forthcoming with Indiana University Press in the German-Jewish Cultures Series in Fall 2026. I presented chapters of the book in international conferences and programs in German and Jewish Studies, Law, and Memory Studies. I began a new research project on the use of the phrase ‘Never Again’ in contemporary German culture, and plan to turn it into a book project during my Sabbatical year. The first article that this research yielded is forthcoming with the New German Critique Journal in early 2026. The year provided also for time for research and with recognition: in Spring 2025 I was a Fellow at the Bloomington Institute for Advanced Study. I received the College Trustees Teaching Award. I spent the summer of 2025 in various research activities beginning with a DAAD supported international conference I co-organized at the University of Cambridge and continuing with a participation at the Summer University in Jewish Studies at Hohenems, Austria and the Memory Studies Association Annual conference in Prague. In between, I worked on my research in Berlin.

Writing the book also allowed me to explore the complex and rich history and diversity of Syrian society and to trace the often dangerous journeys many refugees made to reach Germany. Their paths reveal not only hardship and trauma but also resilience and hope, and they shed light on how displacement and new beginnings can reshape perspectives.

In February, I presented the book at the IU Europe Gateway in Berlin, which sparked very good discussions with colleagues, students, and community members. It was special to be back in Berlin with this work, since the city has been central to both my research and personal life. These conversations highlighted how the arrival of around one million Syrians has not only changed Germany but also reshaped the country’s long struggle with antisemitism and memory culture.

Teresa Kovacs

The academic year 2024/5 marks for me a period where a lot of my long-term research projects came to fruition. In December 2024, the German version of my monograph, Theater der Leere, appeared with Theater der Zeit and was celebrated with a book party at Einar&Bert in Berlin (see image). The book was published in English in April 2025 under the title Theater of the Void: Plasticity, Hauntology, and Nuclear Blast (Cornell UP). In addition, my co-edited 516-page Metzler Handbuch on German director Christoph Schlingensief appeared in May 2025—with a contribution by one of our former graduate students, Kathy Pollock.

Next to major publications, I was busy with articles, talks, and conferences at the University of Vienna, Brussels University, and Duke/UNC. Next to the regular academic life, I co-authored an experimental theoretical text, Der Messingkauf im Curazän, together with Berlin-based playwright and director Kevin Rittberger. Our text adopts Bertolt Brecht’s most important theoretical text on theater for the present. We had a workshop with actors in December 2024 at the IU Gateway in Berlin, followed by an incredibly energizing reading in at the Volksbühne in Berlin (see image). The text will be published in spring 2026. There are further readings and performances scheduled for 2026-27.

The collaboration with Kevin also inspired one of my classes. The students of my GER-332 class performed Kevin’s play, Zwei Sonnen und ein Untergang (2023), as part of the conference “Arts and Aesthetics of Waste and the Wasted” (organized by Rebecca Dirksen, Folklore/Ethnomusicology), followed by a roundtable discussion with Cynthia Shin and other graduate and former undergraduate students of our department (see images below).

Gergana May

Curriculum Enhancement Research, Sweden, Summer 2025

The one intensive week in July 2025 in Stockholm and Uppsala, Sweden, brought me up to date with current developments within the Nordic society, and provoked reflections on the developing consciousness about them. This development was most obvious in the selection, organization and narrative about the artefacts in the museums I visited – the Nordic Museum, the National Museum of Art and Design, the Open-Air Folk Museum Skansen, the August Strindberg Museum, the Nobel Prize Museum, and the Royal Palace. It was truly enlightening to examine the way knowledge was organized and presented, specifically through the ideas and trends selected to be highlighted by the curators. This was a unique opportunity to observe and reflect upon the narrative about Sweden, as constructed by researchers. Some examples that stood out to me were: the thorough interweaving of the indigenous Sami into the Swedish; the emphasis and critical take on Sweden’s colonial past; the focus on the impact of August Strindberg’s authorship on the workers’ movement; the political agenda behind the selections of the Nobel Prize committee; the subversive take on Swedish history and the welfare system by avant-garde artists like painter Ernst Billgren, photographer Anders Petersen and film maker Johan Renck; the awareness of the specificity, continuity and legacy of Swedish design. The examples abound!

Additionally, I was able to engage in conversations with colleagues on their views and opinions regarding the state of the Swedish society. Especially enriching was my visit to a class in Gender and Sexuality in Scandinavia taught by Elina Nelsson, an expert in Gender Studies from Uppsala University. The class discussed the Swedish Armed Forces prominent LGBTQ+-inclusive advertising campaigns and how those reflect the current attitudes within Swedish Society towards the LGBTQ+ community. Her selection of articles, the organization of the discussion, and even the students’ input inspired my further engagement with the topic.

Last but not least, witnessing the efficient operation of public transportation, the prevalence of bicycles and ubiquitous bicycle racks in both cities, as well as the detailed and meticulous organization, alongside consumer education, of recycling options for the inhabitants of the building I resided in, impacts my teaching on Nordic environmental protection and sustainability.

Indeed, most units in my Scandinavian Culture course (currently taught to 60 students for fall 2025) will be heavily impacted by my summer research: Swedish history and politics, the Sami within the Swedish, Nordic design and sustainability, the Nordic childhood, the legacy of author August Strindberg, and the impact of the Nobel Prize on various branches of human research, to name a few.

Chris Sapp

My grant from the National Science Foundation with Rex Sprouse to create the Indiana Parsed Corpus of Historical High German is entering its final year. We have just finished text 101 of the 165 texts that we plan to include in the corpus. We have essentially finished annotating the Middle High German and Early New High German texts, and we’re finding that annotating the Modern German texts goes much more quickly. The corpus is freely available for anyone to use here. We’ve also conducted some research using data from the corpus, presented at the Germanic Linguistics Annual Conference and the Diachronic Generative Syntax Conference. The bulk of the annotation has been completing by Elliott Evans, but many others have had a hand in the project: former and current graduate students Tyler Kniess, David Bolter, Mary Gilbert, Jane Harris, Sal Goldfinch, Janine Emerson, Elaine Dalida, Daniel Mitropolous, and Bradley Weiss, plus undergraduate assistants Zachary Enstrom and Sylvia Tripodi. Thanks to everyone for your hard work and sense of humor!

On the personal side, my family and I spent a wonderful 3 weeks in England and Wales this summer, touring as many Jane Austen sites as possible to celebrate her 250th birthday, seeing plays, walking in the countryside, trying to understand signage in Welsh, and white-knuckling it for four days in a rental car through the hedgerows of Cornwall! My baby Olivia is now a Freshman in high school and officially a theater nerd plus a huge Jane Austen fan. She’s soon to appear as Kitty in Bloomington South’s production of Pride and Prejudice.