Department of Germanic Languages & Literatures University of Toronto
Letter from the Chair
TBA
Stefan Soldovieri
Chair
Undergraduate Report: Highlights from the Academic Year 2023-24
by Professor Hang-Sun Kim, Associate Chair, Undergraduate Studies
I am excited to share highlights from our vibrant Undergraduate German Studies community during the academic year 2023-24. Our energetic German Studies Undergraduate Student Union (GSSU) fostered a strong sense of community through their Deutsch Delight get-togethers, popular pub nights and thought-provoking film screenings, providing opportunities for students to connect and deepen their appreciation for German culture and language. A standout event was an inspiring interview with Jennifer May, Canada’s Ambassador to China, who shared how her undergraduate studies in German and Political Science shaped her diplomatic career. She gave us a lively, humorous, and eloquent account of her studies abroad in Vienna, her overseas assignment in Bonn, and the unexpected opportunities that were open to her because of her knowledge of the German language and culture.
We are fortunate to have a community of intellectually talented and engaged students, and I am delighted to congratulate our exceptional undergraduate award recipients for their remarkable academic achievements: Fiona Ji (Helmut Krueger Undergraduate Scholarship), Hong Ming Huai (Sara Frieda-Miransky Memorial Bursary), Nadine Levinstein (The Anne Glass Memorial Scholarship), Priel Buzny (The Percy Matenko Scholarship), Justin Eden (The Hermann Boeschenstein Memorial Scholarship), and Martin Hau (The Prize of the Ambassador of Switzerland to Canada). Special recognition goes to Janna Abbas for presenting her paper, “Escaping the Labyrinth: Free Will and Human Suffering in Suffering in Márquez, Goethe, and Atwood,” at the German Studies Association Conference in Montreal alongside students from McGill, Ottawa, York and Western Universities.
Finally, through exciting collaborative efforts, we maintained strong ties with other language, literature, and culture programs at U of T. As Co-Lead of the Global Languages Initiative, I co-organized our Second Annual Language and Culture Day with Professor Paolo Frascà. The event brought together fourteen language programs, attracting many students and increasing our visibility at the University.
Here’s to another successful year ahead, filled with opportunities for learning and collaboration!
Undergraduate Profile: My Subterranean Summer: Exploring Medieval Undergrounds as Queer Heterotopias through the University of Toronto Excellence Award (UTEA)
by Brian Finn
As a recent transfer student to the University of Toronto’s German Department, I have been overjoyed by the warm welcome and support I’ve received. It’s rare to feel so at home in a new environment, but the sense of community here has made my transition incredibly smooth. I am especially grateful for the courses which I have taken in the past year, as they have not only introduced me to new eras of German literary history, but also led me to opportunities to engage in research experience as well.
Until last summer, I had never considered delving into Medieval German literature. With a background rooted in more contemporary studies, the unique perspectives offered by Professor Markus Stock’s Middle High German course interested me. In taking the course, I was fascinated with how these texts translated into not only modern German, but modern society as well.
With help from Professor Stock and the Department, I am grateful to have received the 2024 UTEA. Under Professor Stock’s supervision, the project will result in a compendium of medieval and early modern Germanic texts which highlight the underground as a potential queer heterotopia. In combining my interests in queer theory, particularly queer ecologies and geographies, I hope to discover what makes the subterranean not only a location for non-conforming beings and events, but how the underground itself becomes a queer space.
What excites me most about this project is the chance to engage with these texts in an interdisciplinary way, blending history, literature, and theory. I look forward to deepening my understanding of these subjects and sharing my findings with the academic community. The support from everyone at the German department has been invaluable, and I can’t wait to see where this journey takes me.
Sustaining the Humanities by Affirming the Value of Diversity in Languages and Cultures
by Professor Angelica Fenner, Associate Chair of Graduate Studies
In this era of dramatic upheaval, we are each confronted at varying scales with the task of determining what needs to for the better in the face of both ongoing societal and environmental transformation. Within our program, we have been discussing the scholastic and professional goals associated with graduate study in Germanic Languages & Literatures and these intersect with the wider interdiscipline of Germanics, with the Humanities more widely generally, and with infrastructures at the University of Toronto. Solutions will not necessarily always be immediately forthcoming, but the conversations are happening – and not only in our program but across Germanic Studies internationally and in the Humanities broadly defined.
Fall has always been a time of transition, as we are welcoming new beginnings. This past summer, three MA students, Owen Meunier, Hannah Robinson, and Zoe Levson successfully completed the MA program, with Owen now starting Law School in Ottawa after having assisted with the wonderful Canadian Summer School in German, taking place annually in Kassel, and Hannah now continuing her doctoral studies here with a concentration in Multilingualism in Medieval Studies.
In other important transitions, John Evjen successfully defended his thesis, “Proper to Animals: Negotiating Cross-Species Entanglements in Contemporary German Literature,” with supervisory committee members Angelica Fenner (Supervisor), Stefan Soldovieri (German), and Alice Kuzniar (University of Waterloo) attending along with external examiner Joela Jacobs (University of Arizona) and internal external John Noyes (German). Congratulations, Dr. Evjen! We’re glad to have you still teaching in our program this Fall. Dr. Veronica Curran, whose successful thesis defense we reported last year, recently departed for Halifax to become a Faculty Fellow in the Humanities at the University of King’s College, teaching in their Foundation Year Program for the next three years. We wish Veronica much joy in this new position and look forward to staying in contact through our alumni network.
Meanwhile, current doctoral students in the program continue to make excellent progress at every stage of their studies. In respectively February and April 2024, both Sophie Edelhart and Jacob Hermant passed their qualifying exams in the Yiddish doctoral stream and are now crafting their thesis proposal. Doctoral candidate Miriam Schwartz was recently awarded an OGS International for the year 2024-25, and Jacob Hermant’s SSHRC was upgraded to a Bombardier CSGS. Congratulations to you both!! Andre Flicker was shortlisted for the CI Teaching Excellence Award, which recognizes ‘educational leadership, meaningful contributions to course and curriculum development, and impact on student learning.’ Reaching this stage is a high distinction – well done, Andre!
Our emerging scholars are also gaining visibility on the conference circuit. In May 2024, at the recent Medieval Undergrounds symposium co-sponsored with funding from the Jackman Humanities Institute and spearheaded by Prof. Markus Stock, Florian Geddes and Hannah Robinson delivered papers alongside recent U of T graduate, Dr. Walker Horsfall, who is now an assistant professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. A month later, at the German Studies Canada Conference in Montreal, John Evjen and Elisabeth Lange delivered papers based on their thesis research: respectively literary animal studies and the literary production of Sibylle Berg. Additionally, Jacob Hermant delivered a paper on his research on the panel “The Aquatic in Jewish Literature” at the Jewish Studies Conference in San Francisco and Miriam Schwartz on a panel on “Yiddish Surplus Texts and the Aftermaths of War” at the NeMLA conference in Boston.
Important interventions are also being made in academic publishing. With the support of a Diversity and Inclusion Grant from the Waterloo Center for German Studies, PhD candidate Sophie Jordan has published an impressive open access teaching resource Reading Blackness and Race in Germanic Arthurian Romance which is sure to benefit scholars of the Medieval era and beyond. Another PhD candidate, Andre Flicker, has published a wonderful piece, entitled “Dada Historiography; or, How to End One‘s Work,” in a special issue of Germanic Review guest edited by Tanvi Solanki and Willi Goetschel on the topic of ‘Canonical Pressures.’
This Fall, we are privileged to welcome five bright new students into the graduate program. In the MA program, three Yiddish-stream MA students, Emily Glass, Joshua Horowitz, and Lesley Turner, and in the doctoral cohort, Tamara Schaad from Calgary University and Hannah Robinson transitioning from our MA program to focus on Multilingualism and Medieval Studies. We look forward to a dynamic year of scholarly exchange and growth in departmental interactions with both new and returning grads and our faculty, including newly arrived DAAD professor, Dr. Tobias Hof from the University of Munich.
MA Profile
by Owen Meunier
The M.A. program in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures at the University of Toronto has been a rewarding experience. Over the course of the year, I accomplished many of my personal goals such as improving my ability to interact with and analyze complex texts, my German language skills, and my pedagogical methods. My most memorable experiences, this academic year, have been teaching as a course instructor in a classroom and participating at conferences. On the one hand, I had the opportunity to work with undergraduate students on their language acquisition journey as a course instructor in the Introduction to German course. The said teaching opportunity enabled me to develop my creativity and critical thinking skills as I was tasked with finding stimulating strategies to teach course concepts such as grammar, vocabulary, and culture. My favourite lesson was when I took a critical approach at teaching how the German language and the culture of German speaking countries intertwine. Overall, with respect to teaching, it gave me great enjoyment to witness firsthand the growth and progress of my students. On a separate note, I had the very good fortune of speaking at conferences with my mentors Dr. Hang-Sun Kim and Dr. Stefana Gragova in Barrie, Toronto, and Boston. The conferences were transformative as they inspired my teaching endeavour. I am grateful to have attended and participated at these conferences because of the knowledge that I acquired and the opportunity that I received in sharing my ideas and research with colleagues from around the world.
PhD Profile: Printers and other Heroes
by Florian Geddes
In medieval epic poetry, the heroes regularly embark on quests with uncertain outcomes. There is usually some sort of challenge, but the path to success is often full of surprises and detours. I do not have much in common with the protagonists of the stories I read for my research (which is for the best), but when I started my PhD in Toronto five years ago, I did not know where that journey would lead, either. What I know is that I am deeply grateful for the community I found, for the friendships I made, and for all that I’ve learned since I started the PhD program at the German Department.
My dissertation focuses on the materiality of the 15th/16th-century genre of “Heldenbücher,” the books of heroes, which are compilations of epic poetry revolving around Dietrich von Bern and other heroes of medieval German literature. I am interested in these books not just for the stories they contain, but also for how material qualities of the books shape the poems that are compiled in them and what that relationship can tell us about early modern book production and reception. I’ve been fascinated by heroic poetry for a long time as it is a genre that feels familiar and strange at the same time: familiar because of the shared motifs and tropes I have encountered in modern fantasy ever since I started reading, and yet strange because of the genre’s archaic social structures, flexible definitions of heroism, and its seemingly endless re-imagining of the same stories. Manuscripts and early printed books bear witness to the many transformations the poems underwent throughout history and for that reason, a core premise of my research is that text and material must be read closely together to understand how books generate meaning in different time periods.
While reading early printed books is in itself an immensely satisfying experience, over time I became more and more interested in the people that produced them and the manual work that went into printing books in the earlier days of the printing press. In 2019, I became a printing apprentice at Massey College’s Bibliography Room where I was trained in typesetting and letterpress printing. Experimenting with historical typefaces, planning out and designing my own prints, working on different types of presses, and practicing different techniques of printing gave me a newfound appreciation of the enormous amount of work that went into each page of the early modern books that I am researching. More than that, it also gave me an opportunity to work creatively in a concrete, tangible medium; an experience that I am immensely grateful for. While I still work as a volunteer at the Bibliography Room, printmaking has become a hobby of mine, and I even acquired a hand press for printing at home (mostly linocuts right now). If you run into me at the department and you have some time to spare, ask me about my prints!
Faculty Profile: Tobias Hof
by Tobias Hof
I first visited Toronto in the fall 2013 as a Postdoctoral Fellow at Washington University in St. Louis, while attending a conference at the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy. Even though I was only in the city for a few days, I was enamored – and immediately started planning my return. A few years and a few different roles later – as a DAAD visiting professor with the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, a researcher at the Institute of Contemporary History in Munich, and a privatdozent at the University of Munich – I finally returned to Toronto in 2022 as the Hannah Arendt Visiting Chair at the Munk School. I was incredibly sad to leave when my term ended in 2023, but fate intervened and I’m grateful to have been welcomed back as the new DAAD Associate Professor for the Department of Germanic Languages & Literature and the Department of History.
My research focuses predominantly on the history of terrorism, counterterrorism, fascism, and humanitarianism. Several recent publications include Galeazzo Ciano: The Fascist Pretender (University of Toronto Press, 2021), Geschichte des Terrorismus von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart (UTB, 2022) and “Of Hobbits and Tigers. Right-wing extremism and terrorism in Italy since the mid-1970s” (). My current projects include global food aid for Ethiopia in the 1970s and 80s, the far-right’s perception and reception of popular works in fantasy and science fiction, and the global history of right-wing terrorism.
I’m looking forward to getting to know the departments and my new colleagues and students better, and of course to continue exploring the city’s sporting, cultural, and culinary scenes as well as the Canadian outdoors.
Updates from the Yiddish Program
Elementary Yiddish
by Miriam Schwartz
This semester’s Elementary Yiddish (GER 260) class, taught by Miriam Schwartz, brings together an enthusiastic group of students from diverse academic backgrounds. As they begin to develop their Yiddish language skills, they are also deepening their cultural knowledge. With the recent conclusion of the Jewish High Holidays, students explored the traditions surrounding these holidays through Yiddish songs, lively discussions on various folk customs, for example, the traditional casting off of communal sin (called Tashlikh), and an exploration of the symbolism of traditional foods such as honey cake, a sweet stew of carrots (tsimes), and pomegranate seeds.
Graduate Program
by Anna Shternshis
Six PhD and 3 MA students are working within the Yiddish stream of the graduate program. Effectively, this makes the department the home to the largest Yiddish graduate program in North America. Our students are actively involved in pursuing research on Yiddish folklore, Yiddish literature written by women, Jewish Enlightenment and much more. Here are some highlights of accomplishments of our doctoral students: Miriam Borden has recently published a peer-reviewed article in the 38th volume of Canadian Jewish Studies, titled “Joshua, King David, and the Flying Nun: Doodles and Reader Annotations in Post-Holocaust Yiddish Primers for Children”. Miriam Schwartz has just won the membership in the prestigious doctoral seminar of the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture. Jacob Hermant is working on his thesis proposal for a dissertation on Yiddish literature of the Jewish Enlightenment as a underacknowledged form of Jewish political thought, and its reception by Yiddish literary critics and activists in the early 20th-century. Hannah Wickham recently presented their paper “Sarah in Her Own Words: Silences and Disclosures” at Farbindungen: Yiddish Studies Conference 2024, and is currently preparing for their comps. Our MA students Emily Glass, Lesley Turner and Joshua Horowitz are working on their pursuits: Glass is interested in Yiddish Dance, Turner is working on her paper on Chava Rosenfarb, and Horowitz is researching Yiddish radical culture in United States.
Himel Family and Al and Malka Green Yiddish Studies Lectures
In 2023-24, and in the Fall 2024, we continued to present Yiddish-language lecture series, in cooperation with Anne Tanenbaum Center for Jewish Studies. The program enables us to bring the world-class speakers to present the latest in the field of Yiddish studies af Yidish. In the recent months, we have hosted Prof. Mikhail Krutikov from the University of Michigan, who spoke about Soviet Yiddish literature addressing the Holocaust, Prof. Dov Ber Kerler from the Indiana University, who discussed old Yiddish literature, Professor Rachel Rojanski (Brown) who spoke to us about Rachel Auerbach, Professor Szonja Komoróczy (Central European University) who discussed Hungarian Yiddish, Professor Simo Muir (University College London) who addressed Yiddish culture in Finland, Professor Magdalena Kozłowska (University of Warsaw) who discussed Polish Yiddish Women writers in the interwar period, and many more speakers. Visiting professors in the series always meet with our graduate students to provide advice, share insights, and listen about their new projects. We are looking forward to continuing with this unique program in the next years.
The 16th Toronto German Studies Symposium 2024: Medieval Undergrounds
by the organizers Markus Stock, Florian Geddes, Sophie Jordan, Hannah Robinson, and Brian Finn
The 16th Annual Toronto German Studies Symposium “Medieval Undergrounds” took place between 5-7 May, 2024 in the Paul Cadario Conference Centre at Croft Chapter House of University College with speakers and participants from across North America and Europe attending both in person and online. The conference was an interdisciplinary investigation into pre-modern human interactions with underground spaces, both as a traditional site of mythological and spiritual significance as well as an actively evolving economic sector.
The first day opened with a panel on “Subterranean Secrecy” with papers by Anne Alwis (University of Kent), Maximilian Wick (Goethe-Universität Frankfurt) and Florian Geddes (University of Toronto) exploring the association between underground spaces and secret knowledge. In the afternoon, these themes were expanded on by Christopher Miller (University of Notre Dame), Wynn Martin (University of Toronto) and Irit Kleimann (Boston University) investigating the “Mythologies of the Underground.” The day concluded with a workshop in which attendees collectively undertook a close reading of Iudicium Iovis, a fifteenth-century Latin text written by German humanist Paulus Niavis.
The conference’s second day returned to questions of “Medieval Undergrounds and Spirituality,” with papers from Laura Moncion (University of Toronto) and Julia Rüthemann (École des hautes études en sciences sociales) in the morning. A second morning panel led us from the mythological and spiritual into “Epistemological and Ecological Entanglements in Medieval Narratives” with papers from Walker Horsfall (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign) and Alan Montroso (University of Maryland). The keynote address from Heidi Scott on “Tropical Nature and the Subterranean in Early Colonial Spanish America” was received with great enthusiasm and a lively question period that lasted well over an hour.
The last day turned to the early modern period and its “Pre-Industrial Extractive Entanglements,” with talks in the morning from Tina Asmussen (Deutsches Bergbau-Museum Bochum), Lena Asrih (Deutsches Bergbau-Museum Bochum), Aleksandra Prica (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill), and Bettina Bildhauer (University of St. Andrews). In the afternoon, the conference closed with two papers from Christina Lechtermann (Ruhr-Universität Bochum), and Thomas Morel (Universität Wuppertal) on “Visually Experiencing the Underground.”
Overall, the conference was highly successful in identifying overarching themes in medieval and early modern representation of underground spaces and establishing an international network of scholars for future collaboration on the Medieval Undergrounds project headed by Prof. Markus Stock here at the University of Toronto.
iPRAKTIKUM: Promising new collaborations in Germany and the GTA
by Elisabeth Lange
For more information and updates, please visit our website.
Alumni profile: Learning as a life-long process
by Anna Thach
I defended my PhD thesis, which focused on the antifascist films of the GDR, in 2018. What drew me to the topic was a fascination with understanding the ways in which different people think and live, and the means through which cinema can both represent those but also be used to influence them. Having now lived in Berlin for over 10 years, I appreciate the insight my research also gave me into the city and its history – particularly as I now live directly over the path of the Berlin Wall!
What I learned the most about myself during the writing and research of my thesis, though, was a solid understanding of how I learn, and the skills and strategies I need to best do that. My work now at an international school, as curriculum coordinator for students in grades 6-10, involves helping students learn those skills before they even reach university: to understand their own preferences and strengths as learners, and to develop a range of skills and strategies to support these.
The process of writing my thesis helped me to see (and love!) learning as a life-long process. My aim now is to encourage my students to think of themselves as life-long learners; to approach the world with empathy, curiosity and an open mind to different perspectives. One thing I love about my work is that I not only get to see students rise to this challenge every day, but that I continue to learn from them as well.