Past Events

We are thrilled to announce the department’s very first Oktoberfest happening next week. Date: Friday, October 3, 2025Time: 2 to 4 pmLocation: Romero Room, Loretto CollegeGet ready for an afternoon full of fun. There will be Bavarian beer, pretzels, sweets, classic German drinks that you can mix yourself, Oktoberfest games, a photo booth, and more.✅ Free entry✅ Free food, drinks, and activities⚠️ Remember to bring your ID if you plan to enjoy the beerBring your friends and join us to experience the authentic German vibe. And of course, feel free to dress up. Lederhose, Dirndl, or your own DIY costume, we cannot wait to see your creativity.We look forward to celebrating with you at this exciting event. Read More »

The 18th Toronto German Studies Symposium will take place October 2–4, 2025. This year’s theme is “Considering Cross-Species Assemblages: Conflict, Collaboration, Kinship”. The symposium will feature a diverse program including a screening of Singing Back the Buffalo by Indigenous Canadian filmmaker Tasha Hubbard, as well as presentations by scholars sharing research in progress. Download the Program Booklet Thursday, October 2, 2025 Location: Media Commons Theatre (3rd floor), Robarts library, 130 St. George Street 18:00 Screening of Singing Back the Buffalo with Tasha Hubbard and Kyra Northwest Virtual introduction by Kyra Northwest (Montana First Nation) and post-screening discussion with filmmaker and University of Alberta professor Tasha Hubbard (Peepeekisis First Nation) Singing Back the Buffalo (dir. Tasha Hubbard, CA, 99 min)A visually rich and compelling story of indigenous kinship with buffalo and how the latter’s return to the Great Plains can restore sustainability and balance to wider ecologies. Friday, October 3, 2025 Location: Room 208N (2nd floor), The Munk School for Global Affairs, 1 Devonshire Place 9:00 Opening Remarks Land Acknowledgement, Dr. Stefan Soldovieri, Chair, Germanic Lang. & Literatures. Opening Remarks, Dr. Angelica Fenner, Prof of German and Cinema Studies 9:15 Figure and Ground: Landscape, Habitat, & Umwelt in the Visual Field ... Read More »

International Herder Society Conference: Herder’s GeographySeptember 4–7, 2025 | University of TorontoSenior Common Room, Brennan Hall We are delighted to announce that the bi-annual conference of the International Herder Society will take place from September 4–7, 2025, at the University of Toronto. The conference theme is Herder’s Geography. Professor John Noyes, of the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures and President of the Herder Society, will welcome scholars from around the world for this important gathering. The event will bring together researchers and enthusiasts for lively discussions and to explore the question: “What does Geography mean for Herder?” Speakers Nigel DeSouza (Ottawa) · Louise Fischer (Leipzig) · Sarah Goeth (Aachen) · Matteo Garau (Turin) · Rainer Godel (Darmstadt) · Katherine Arens (Austin) · Johannes Schmidt (Clemson) · Catherine Girardin (Paris) · David Takamura (Dickinson) · Daniel Purdy (Penn State) · Sonia Sikka (Ottawa) · Horst Lange (Arkansas) · John Noyes (Toronto) · Marcus Bullock (Wisconsin–Milwaukee) · Carl Niekerk (Urbana–Champaign) Conference Agenda Thursday, September 4, 202513:30 – Welcoming remarks13:45 – John Noyes (University of Toronto): Introduction: What is Geography and Why Does it Matter to Herder?14:00 – Opening PresentationNigel DeSouza (University of Ottawa): Environment/Milieu/Territory: Aristotle, Herder, Merleau-Ponty Section 1: Geography’s Field ... Read More »

You are warmly invited to a research talk by Miriam Udel, associate professor of German Studies and Judith London Evans Director of the Tam Institute of Jewish Studies at Emory University. Research Talk Title:Children’s Literature: Materials for Yiddish WorldmakingDate: Tuesday, April 1, 2025Time: 2:00 – 3:30 PMLocation: Charbonnel Lounge, 1st Floor, Elmsley Hall About the Lecture:Around the turn of the twentieth century, a group of Jewish educators, authors, and cultural leaders undertook a bold project: creating a corpus of nearly one thousand books and several periodicals, which flourished in conjunction with the secular Yiddish school systems that spanned the globe in the 1920s and 30s. These vibrant texts cut across continents and ideologies but shared in their creators’ overarching goal: to write into being a better world, a shenere un besere velt—in a distinctively Yiddish key. The question of what a “better world” looks like is, of course, inextricably bound up in questions of political vision. No less political is the imagined figure of the young reader, set against the backdrop of changing conceptions of childhood and family life. We will reconsider a set of “orphaned texts,” the stories, poems, and plays written for children during the first half of the twentieth century, ... Read More »

You are warmly invited to an academic presentation by Miriam Schwartz, 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:Dubbed Jewish Literature: Orality, Multilingualism, and Translation in Twentieth-Century Hebrew and Yiddish WritingDate: Thursday, April 3, 2025Time: 4:00 PMLocation: Department Library, Room 323, 3rd Floor, Odette Hall About the Lecture:In Mirian’s dissertation, she examines orality and speech in twentieth-century Hebrew and Yiddish literature. During the early decades of the twentieth century, both Yiddish and Hebrew were transnational languages. This diasporic state of writing produced a multilingual literature, that is written in a seemingly monolingual fashion. Yet beneath this façade, modern Jewish literature frequently suppresses or obscures other languages – languages that do not appear in the text yet reveal themselves in various ways.By exploring the noticeable gap between the language on page and the language of the story world, Schwartz aims to uncover the underlying lingual tensions, ideological affiliations, identity, and gender politics of the text. This gap becomes especially pronounced when the marked and unmarked languages within a text do not “speak” in the same tongue. The dissertation offers a comparative reading of Jewish ... Read More »

You are warmly invited to an academic lecture by Prof. Christiane Arndt, Associate Prof. in the Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures at Queen’s University. Lecture Title:Between a Rock and a Hard Place: Gardening in Recent LiteratureDate: Thursday, March 13, 2025Time: 4:00 PMLocation: Department Library, Room 323, 3rd Floor, Odette Hall About the Lecture:In response to recent ecological and societal crises, literary texts might not initially appear as an obvious solution. Yet auto-fictional texts that explore material practices such as gardening are trending. By engaging with themes like racism, colonialism, and ecological activism, these works engage with gardening in a narrative framework that has the potential to probe the complex interplay of identity and societal narratives.Central to the discussion are analyses of works by Camille Dungy, Jamaica Kincaid, and Lola Randl, which illustrate diverse interactions between gardening and writing. These texts explore issues of racism, colonialism and ecological activism, and thus exemplify how gardening provides a lens through which to explore the dynamic between material practices and narrativity.The discussion is theoretically informed by insights from material culture theories, particularly those of Donna Haraway and Tim Ingold. Exploring how material practices are narrated within an anthropological framework underscores the transformative potential of integrating narrative ... Read More »

You are warmly invited to an academic lecture by Prof. Tobias Hof, DAAD Associate Professor for German Studies and History at the University of Toronto. Lecture Title:‘Völkisch Visions’: The Artist Johann Bossard, National Socialism, and the Legacy of an IdeologyDate: Thursday, February 27, 2025Time: 4:00 PMLocation: Charbonnel Lounge, Elmsley Hall About the Lecture:The term ‘völkisch’ has reemerged in German public discourse, fueled by the far-right party Alternative für Deutschland. But what lies beneath this ideology? Through the lens of artist Johann Michael Bossard (1874–1950) and his Gesamtkunstwerk in the Lüneburg Heath (built 1911–1950), the talk explores the origins and worldview of the völkisch movement. It examines not only its ties to and distinctions from National Socialism but also the remarkable endurance of völkisch networks long after the end of World War II. About the Speaker: Tobias Hof is DAAD Associate Professor for German Studies and History at the University of Toronto. He was previously the 2022/2023 Hannah Arendt Visiting Chair at the Munk School for Global Affairs and Public Policy at the University of Toronto, DAAD Visiting Professor at the History Department at UNC Chapel Hill and a Post-Doctoral Fellow at Washington University in St. Louis. He received his Ph.D. from the University in ... Read More »

You are warmly invited to an academic presentation by Astrid Klee, PhD candidate in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures.Presentation Title:Representations of Mental Illness in the Patient Cases of Emil Kraepelin’s Einführung in die Psychiatrische Klinik (Introduction to Psychiatric Practice)Date: Thursday, January 30, 2025Time: 4:00 PMLocation: Odette Hall, Room 323About the Speaker: Astrid Klee’s research is a starting point for reassessing the descriptions of normative behaviour and deviance from norms within the context of psychiatric cases and how these preconceptions extend into current language use. Scientific language is used to convey a sense that what is written is incontrovertible fact, and this research not only provides insight into the use and manipulation of language in cases of insanity but also re-evaluates perceptions of otherness within culture. Presentation Description:In her dissertation project, Klee demonstrates how an examination of patient cases presented in Kraepelin’s Einführung in die Psychiatrische Klinik not only reveals the logic of Kraepelin’s development of a system of categorization, it also reveals a subtext of cultural and personal preconceptions.Emil Kraepelin (1856-1926), whom some consider to be the father of modern psychiatry, is credited with developing the psychiatric classification system that is still used today. The latest version of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and ... Read More »

Dear All,You are warmly invited to an academic presentation by Maria Harutyunyan, a PhD candidate in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures.Presentation Title:On a Journey of Virtue: Philanthropy, Female Middle-Class Agency, and Social Distinction in 18th and 19th Century Women’s NovelsDate: Thursday, January 16, 2025Time: 4:00 PMLocation: Odette Hall, Room 323About the Speaker: Maria Harutyunyan’s research focuses on the representation of female middle-class agency and distinction with relation to philanthropy in the works of women authors from the late 18th to the mid-19th centuries. Her objective is to illuminate the interconnection between philanthropy and the agency of women of the middle class from the perspective of women writers of the early industrial period.  About the Presentation:“Oh, if the love of my fellow-creatures had not stuck its roots so deeply in my heart as to be incorporated with my very self-love, what would have become of me?” (LaRoche, 135).In Sophie von LaRoche’s 18th-century novel, the intricate relationship between self-love and love for others plays a pivotal role in the character development of the protagonist, Sophie Sternheim. This dynamic is reflected in the concept of philanthropy, which reveals the complexities of human nature by highlighting the tension between altruism and egoism. The notion of altruistic ... Read More »

Dear All,You are warmly invited to an academic presentation by Maria Harutyunyan, a PhD candidate in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures.Presentation Title:On a Journey of Virtue: Philanthropy, Female Middle-Class Agency, and Social Distinction in 18th and 19th Century Women’s NovelsDate: Thursday, January 16, 2025Time: 4:00 PMLocation: Odette Hall, Room 323About the Speaker: Maria Harutyunyan’s research focuses on the representation of female middle-class agency and distinction with relation to philanthropy in the works of women authors from the late 18th to the mid-19th centuries. Her objective is to illuminate the interconnection between philanthropy and the agency of women of the middle class from the perspective of women writers of the early industrial period.  About the Presentation:“Oh, if the love of my fellow-creatures had not stuck its roots so deeply in my heart as to be incorporated with my very self-love, what would have become of me?” (LaRoche, 135).In Sophie von LaRoche’s 18th-century novel, the intricate relationship between self-love and love for others plays a pivotal role in the character development of the protagonist, Sophie Sternheim. This dynamic is reflected in the concept of philanthropy, which reveals the complexities of human nature by highlighting the tension between altruism and egoism. The notion of altruistic ... Read More »