Department of Germanic Languages & Literatures University of Toronto

Application Deadline: Thursday, December 18, 2025 Read More »

You are warmly invited to an academic presentation by Jacob Hermant, PhD candidate in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures and the collaborative program with the Anne Tanenbaum Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Toronto. Lecture Title:Reading Diasporism in Yiddish Literary HistoryDate: Thursday, November 27, 2025Time: 4:00-6:00 PMLocation: Department Library, Room 323, 3rd Floor, Odette Hall About the Lecture: Jacob’s dissertation looks at nineteenth-century Yiddish literature and early twentieth-century radical Jewish politics in an attempt to locate and reveal an intellectual lineage between the two movements. The first wave of modern Yiddish literature, as part of the Haskalah (Jewish Enlightenment), is often read as didactic and moralistic, aiming to educate and modernize the Jewish population of Eastern Europe in order to integrate into modern European life and culture, and away from perceived superstition and backwardness, especially with regard to the use of Yiddish as a vernacular. While this was certainly the goal of many authors, a close reading of the period’s Yiddish literary texts can highlight momentary breaks that reveal a far more complicated and nuanced relationship between the Jewish intelligentsia and folk, one which finds both utility and positive affective connections in traditional Jewish life, as well as anticipating threads of ... Read More »

Deadline Monday, January 5th, 2026 Read More »

The German Studies Student Union is proud to present you with the 2025 edition of Zeitgeist! Our authors and editors have put their hearts and souls into this work, and we hope you enjoy reading it. Read More »

Welcome to the latest edition of The View From Here, the 2025 newsletter from the Department of Germanic Languages & Literatures at the University of Toronto. READ THE NEWSLETTER This issue celebrates the vibrant energy of our community – highlighting student achievements, faculty creativity, and our shared commitment to exploring language and culture. It brings together a diverse range of contributions from across the department, including work by Stefan Soldovieri, Angelica Fenner, Hang-Sun Kim, Brian Finn, Elisabeth Lange, Emily Glass, Enrica Piccardo, John Zilcosky, Stefana Gargova, and Walker Horsfall. We hope you enjoy reading about the inspiring work that continues to keep our department thriving. Read More »

by Walker Horsfall I began teaching at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in Fall 2022 as a Lecturer, then secured an appointed an Assistant Professor the following year. I am currently working on a monograph that examines the many and creative ways in which science and natural philosophy, especially astronomy, geology, and medicine, informed the form, content, and function of Middle High German religious and narrative poetry. At Illinois, I have had fortunate occasion to offer several courses on medieval topics, including on Norse mythology, the Icelandic saga tradition, and the history of sexuality in premodern literature. But I have also had the lovely opportunity to teach our modern German language courses, for which I am empowered by and grateful to experience gained teaching for the German department at UofT. In fact, I have found much in common between the German departments at Illinois and Toronto. For example, this past February, our department, together with the Initiative in Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies at the University of Illinois, hosted a book launch and discussion for my colleague Anke Pinkert’s new publication, Remembering 1989: Future Archives of Public Protest. Earlier that particular morning, I happened to have had a meeting that ... Read More »

New Book on Plurilingualism by Professor Enrica Piccardo  Our department is wonderfully enriched by the contributions of affiliate faculty whose expertise in cognate units such as history, Jewish Studies, and Sociology supports the interdisciplinary researches of our doctoral students. One such scholar is Enrica Piccardo, Professor of Applied Linguistics and Language Education in the Languages and Literacies Education Program at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE). She serves as Director of the Centre for Educational Research in Languages and Literacies and also as distinguished Maître de Conférences (Associate Professor) at the Université Grenoble-Alpes (France). Her internationally recognized research is centred around Second/Foreign Language learning and teaching, plurilingualism and mediation, the impact of the Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR) on language teaching and assessment, complexity theories, and creativity in language acquisition. Together with collaborator Le Chen, she recently published the volume Autoethnographies of Plurilingualism: Voices of the Selves (Routledge, 2024) which offers a theoretically grounded and methodologically innovative examination of the complex trajectories and identities of plurilingual speakers. Through a rich collection of personal narratives, the volume invites readers to witness how language users navigate, negotiate, and reimagine their linguistic repertoires, thus transcending conventional notions of language competence. ... Read More »

The origin of this book lies in pre-Covid times, in 2019, when graduate students in the Centre for Comparative Literature organized a conference called Timepieces. The idea was to investigate how humans are defined in and by time, both abstractly, as mortal creatures with internal clocks, and materially, through the pieces that we have used throughout history to mark time. The students asked me to offer the keynote lecture, and I presented on “Modern Times.” The conference was a thrilling intellectual experience, featuring speakers from across North America and Europe. The conference’s energy seemed too vital for us to let it go up in smoke, so the two of the main organizers, Teresa Valentini and Angela Weiser, approached me about producing a volume together. They brought endless vitality to the project, and I contributed my experience with publishing. At this point in my career, it felt meaningful to share not only intellectual insights but also practical ones: How do you publish a book, from beginning to end? We approached Len Husband, an acquisitions editor at the University of Toronto Press, who expressed interest. Then we began the long process of selecting the best papers from the conference, approaching the authors, ... Read More »

by Stefana Gargova, Language Coordinator Open AI released ChatGPT on November 30th, 2022, and six days later it was announced that it had reached 1 million users. Ever since, access to AI has become ubiquitous and post-secondary institutions have adopted a rather sober and practical attitude, encouraging teachers to explore its pedagogical applications. For the field of language acquisition, this isn’t a huge stretch – studies show that AI can be effective in extending practice, as well as supporting instructors in developing customizable teaching materials. As part of the German Department’s ongoing efforts to support the professional development of our language instructors, we were delighted to welcome Marje Zschiesche-Stock, an international professional development trainer with 10+ years of experience, who led a two-hour workshop with the poignant title “O.K. or K.O.? The use of AI in the Second Language Classroom”, which presented meaningful and creative ways to productively integrate AI into language teaching with added value. Participants enjoyed not only the invigorating social aspect of the in-person event, but also the hands-on activities, which introduced AI-based strategies for authentic language interactions, descriptive picture-based activities, as well as practice support that extends well beyond the classroom. Zschiesche-Stock’s workshop offered our instructors ... Read More »

Dancing My Way Through Yiddish Language and History by Emily Glass My journey learning Yiddish has always led me to rich and unexpected experiences, and this past year as an MA student in the Yiddish stream of Germanic Languages and Literatures was no exception. The program enabled me, in a relatively short period of time, to experience and learn about a wide range of disciplines. My passion for languages and literatures was nourished by an elective course in Comparative Literature on Medieval Spanish Literature with Dr. Jill Ross, as well as the core courses of the M.A. program. From the German and Yiddish Studies Seminar and the Yiddish Language Seminar I learned to closely read a variety of texts and use theoretical tools to analyse them.  In the second semester, a course in Second Language Learning at OISE challenged my understanding of language pedagogy. Having completed a B.Ed. in education at Simon Fraser University in 2019 and then taught secondary school French for three and a half years, I had a solid grounding in language education. However, I had never fully immersed myself in the scientific study of how language is learned and most effectively taught. Many things I had previously learned ... Read More »