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Department Newsletter
Autumn 2003

Prof. Kai Hammermeister - Editor

• Note from the Editor.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• Faculty Profile: Professor Kathryn Corl.
• Faculty News 2002 ~ 2003.
• GLL lectures and other events in 2002 ~ 2003.

Graduate Student News 2002 ~ 2003

• Awards and Honors.
• Degrees and Candidacy Examinations.
• Graduate Student News.
• New Faces in the Department.
• Undergraduate Student News 2002 ~ 2003.
• Staff News 2002 ~ 2003.
• Alumnae/i News 2002 ~ 2003.
• Graduates of the Department, what have you been doing?.
• Join the Friends of the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures.

Note from the Editor

If all goes according to plan, this will be our last newsletter from Cunz Hall. Some time late next year we are scheduled to move into the newly renovated Hagerty Hall which will become the World Media Center. In our next issue we will take some time to present our new home to you. In this issue, we merely want to say our Farewell to Cunz. We all look forward to this spacial change a lot as there will be new classrooms and lecture halls, new media rooms, a cafe, and - maybe best of all - faculty office with new furniture and windows! Some of you will still recall the architectural nightmare of the windowless offices on the inner side of the hallways in Cunz. In another year, those will be memory.

Yet while architecturally we anticipate upgrades in every respect, we are also a bit sad to leave behind a building named after a former colleague of the German Department. The Dieter Cunz Hall will not be torn down, but it will also no longer house the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures. For us, the name was a reminder of the tradition of our department. In the future, we will be part of the World Media Center that we will once again share with the other modern language departments. What's in a name? Some sentimentality, maybe a program, hopefully also a promise as our department continues to define its role in the ever-changing requirements of higher education. We understand the move as an invitation and a challenge to continue our work as Germanists in a building that announces in its name its global committment and its embrace of a multiplicity of media. For now, however, we say Goodbye to The Dieter Cunz Hall of Modern Languages.

With the best wishes for 2004,
Kai Hammermeister

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Faculty Profile

Professor Corl

MultiCAT-die Katze ist aus dem Sack!

This past summer, OSU's MultiCAT development team had good reason to celebrate. More than 4,000 incoming students were efficiently placed into their respective German, French, and Spanish courses using the new MultiCAT Multimedia Computer-Adaptive Placement Tests. The successful roll-out of the tests marked a long-awaited milestone for the multi-language development team headed by Kathryn Corl, Director of the Department's Undergraduate German Language Program.

What is a CAT?

Computer-adaptive tests or CATs, as the name suggests, are computer-delivered tests that are tailored to the ability of each test taker. Advantages of computer-adaptive tests are efficiency and accuracy of measurement, as well as ease of administration, scoring, and reporting. Two essential ingredients for a computer-adaptive test are a large bank of calibrated items and a selection algorithm. Following the presentation of each item, the algorithm calculates an ongoing ability estimate for the test taker and then selects the next appropriate item for presentation. The procedure continues until the program determines the level of performance of the test taker.

MultiCAT at OSU

The MultiCAT project began in 1995 with a three-year grant from the U.S. Department of Education's Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education (FIPSE). Post-funding support from OSU's Technology Enhanced Learning and Research (TELR) program, the Ohio Board of Regents, OSU's College of Humanities, OSU's Foreign Language Center, and the language departments helped see the project to its present stage of completion.

The MultiCAT project stands on the shoulders of Ohio's successful Collaborative Articulation and Assessment Project (CAAP)-another FIPSE-funded project that seeks to facilitate communication and articulation between high school and university foreign language programs in Ohio. The high school teachers in the early years of the CAAP project were vocal about the need to develop a placement test that reflects more accurately current classroom practices and standards, namely the use of multimedia and the inclusion of authentic reading materials of various text types.

The networked MultiCAT tests take advantage of today's multimedia environment, which permits the integration of audio, video, and print materials as well as data recording capabilities. The current version of the tests consists of two multiple-choice subtests, reading and language in context, both with items based on authentic materials from foreign language sources such as articles from magazines and newspapers, advertisements, personal correspondence, brochures, literary excerpts, emails, and Web sites.

The item banks for the two subtests in each language contain more than 500 items each, with even more items ready to be added. A listening subtest, which will incorporate audio as well as video, is under development. When students take the MultiCAT test in one of the public computing labs on the main campus or one of the regional campuses, the results are available immediately, and the student's placement is automatically recorded and delivered to OSU's registrar. Students can be tested in groups in scheduled pre-registration orientation sessions or they can be tested individually on demand.

The Team: Multidisciplinary Collaboration

According to Corl, the implementation of the MultiCAT test at OSU has been the result of long-term, multidiscipline collaboration that has involved three OSU language departments, outside psychometric and design consultants, and programmers, graphic designers and technology specialists from OSU's College of Humanities. Team leaders for each language, in addition to Corl, are Diane Birckbichler from the Department of French and Italian and Donna Long and Janice Macian from OSU's Department of Spanish and Portuguese. James Cheng from Humanities Information Systems is the project's programmer and technology wizard, and graphic designers Lauren Aland, Abhijit Varde, and Amod Damle were instrumental in the interface design efforts. Ryan Bowles, formerly an intern at CAT, Inc., and currently a graduate student in the Department of Psychology at the University of Virginia, wrote the adaptive algorithms and oversees the measurement aspects of the project.

Item writing and review for the German MultiCAT was an inter-institutional collaborative effort with German-language colleagues Kay Barr (Upper Arlington High School), Catherine Fraser (Indiana University), Aleidine Moeller (University of Nebraska-Lincoln), Johanna Watzinger-Tharp (University of Utah), Richard Jurasek (Antioch College), Eckhard Kuhn-Osius (Hunter College), and Kathryn Corl,(OSU). The MultiCAT project has also provided financial support and a unique hands- on learning opportunity for a few generations of Graduate Research Associates in each language. Germanic grads Stephanie Libbon (now at Kent State), Patricia Fellinger (now at Upper Arlington High School), Nikhil Sathe (now at Ohio University), Edith Wolferstetter (Munich), and Andrea Herzog (Salzburg) formed the backbone of the text selection, cataloguing, databasing, and text scanning efforts needed for the German item banks. Their attention to detail and relentless pursuit of copyright permissions were unparalleled.

The 9 Lives of MultiCAT

All big technology projects have their ups and downs, and MultiCAT was no exception. At times it seemed to the project team that the CAT was on the last of its nine lives. The loss of a faculty psychometric expert early in the project, and the need to update software and to develop tools and procedures for item development posed significant challenges, but none that could not be solved. The resourcefulness of programmer James Cheng always helped the CAT land on its feet. For the GRAs, the collection of texts for the reading and language-in-context was a major effort-written permission had to be obtained for each text that was selected to be sent to the item writers and this led to an interesting "chicken-or-egg" problem: should the team first obtain permission for something that the item writers might not use, or should permission be obtained after the items had been written and tested? With time and tenacity the MultiCAT team became skilled at locating textual sources that were visually interesting, the right length-and most importantly--royalty and copyright-free.

MultiCAT's Future

What are OSU's plans for MultiCAT's future? Though the test is currently in use only at OSU, the project team is currently talking to potential publishers to find ways to share the result of their work with other institutions. Finding a publisher to handle the details of distribution and technical support is an important next step. The next life of MultiCAT? The listening comprehension subtest is the next item on the horizon. "The technology for storage and delivery of multiple audio and video files is finally commonplace and will enable us to move forward with the next phase," says Project Director Corl.

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Faculty News 2002 ~ 2003

Autumn - Summer

Barbara Becker-Cantarino published the chapter "Zur Bedeutung der Schriftstellerinnen der Romantik." In: Die Sehnsucht eines Königs. Ludwig I. von Bayern (1786-1868), die Romantik und das Schloss Runkelstein. Ausstellungskatalog. Stadt Bozen: Schloss Runkelstein, 2003, pp. 179-89; the catalogue for this Romanticism exhibit (from April to November 2003) at Castel Roncolo appeared also in Italian. Her article "Kanon und Geschlecht in der Literaturgeschichte am Beispiel der Autorinnen der Romantik," appeared in Akten des X. Internationalen Germanistenkongresses Wien 2000. Ed. by Peter Wiesinger. Bern: Lang, 2003, vol. 8, pp. 99-104. She published "Johann Scheffler und die Kontroverse um seine Tuercken-Schrifft," in Memoria Silesiae, edited by Miroslawa Czarnecka and Andreas Solbach. Wroclaw: Universitätsverlag, 2003, pp. 35-45 and the articles on "Romantik / Orientalismus" and "Freundschaft / Frauenfreundschaft" and "Frauenliteratur" in the Metzler Lexicon Gender Studies - Geschlechterstudien. Stuttgart: Metzler, 2003, pp. 123-25, 129-31, and 344-45. Her article on "Friendship" appeared in the Encyclopedia of the Enlightenment. Ed. Alan Charles Kors et. al. Oxford: Oxford University Press 2002, vol. 2, pp. 130-38.

Last November she traveled to the University of Halle, Germany and gave a lecture on "Johanna Eleonora Petersen und ihr Wirken in England," at the workshop "Das Pietisten-Ehepaar Petersen und ihre Ausstrahlung im 18. Jahrhundert" at the Zentrum zur Erforschung des Pietismus, Franckesche Stiftungen in Halle. At the annual meeting of the Modern Language Association in New York December 2002, she read a paper on "Pietist Enconunters: The Autobiographies of Johann Wilhelm and Johanna Eleonora Petersen." On 29 January 2003 she gave a lecture on "Frauenlektüre und Empfindsamkeit" at the Landesbibliothek Oldenburg for the Bibliotheksgesellschaft. She lectured on "Körper-Diskurse in Judith-Dramen" at the University of Oldenburg on January 30, 2003. Beginning a sabbatical year in the spring of 2003, she spent two months at the Herzog August Bibliothek in Wolfenbüttel with a Director's Invitation fellowship. She gave a lecture on "Gewalt und Leidenschaft: Zu Sextus Bircks und Martin Opitz' Judith" at the at the Wolfenbüttel Barock-Kongress in March and in April she traveled to Wroclaw, Poland, where she presented a lecture at the university on "Gewallt in Hebbels Judith." While at Wolfenbüttel she and was able to complete the manuscript of her book Pietism and Women's Autobiography: The Life of Lady Johanna Eleonora Petersen, Written by Herself (1689/1719). She gave the keynote lecture on "Literarische Geselligkeit: Neue Handlungsspielräume für Frauen um 1800?" at the conference on Handlungsräume für Frauen um 1800 at the University of Jena in July. At the annual meeting of the German Studies Association in New Orleans in September 2003, she presented a paper on "What is German Literature? A view from the Twenty-First Century" at the session Responses to Schlaffer's Kurze Geschichte der deutschen Literatur organized by colleague Nina Berman. She organized an chaired the session "Writing a Literary History of the German Enlightenment for an Anglo-American Audience," at the International Congress on the Enlightenment at the University of California, Los Angeles, August 5-9, 2003. The session brought together several contributors to volume 5: The Eighteenth Century of the Camden House History of German Literature which she is editing. Several of her reviews appeared this past year: of Wolfram Mauser, Konzepte aufgeklärter Lebensführung. Literarische Kultur im frühmodernen Deutschland (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann 2000), in: The Lessing Yearbook 36 (2002), pp.248-50; of Angelika Kauffmann. Briefe einer Malerin. Ausgewählt, kommentiert und mit einer Einleitung von Waltraud Maierhofer. (Mainz: Dieterich'sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1999) in Goethe Yearbook 11 (2002); of Michael Ott, Das ungeschriebene Gesetz. Ehre und Geschlechterdifferenz in der deutschen Literatur um 1800 (Freiburg: Rombach Verlag, 2001), in Arbitrium. Zeitschrift für Rezensionen zur germanistischen Literaturwissenschaft 20,3 (2000), pp. 316-20; of Nicola Kaminski, Kreuz-Gänge. Romanexperimente der deutschen Romantik (Paderborn: Schöning, 2001) in Germanistik 43, 1 (2002), pp. 291-92; of Heide Holmer and Albert Meier (eds.), Dramenlexikon des 18. Jahrhunderts.(München: Beck, 2001) in Germanistik 43, (2002), pp. 799-800; and of Silke Schlichtmann, Geschlechterdifferenz in der Literaturrezeption um 1800? Zu zeitgenössischen Goethe-Lektüren (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2001), in The German Quarterly 76, 2 (2000), pp. 256-57. Her review article "Neues zu Therese Heyne-Forster-Huber und Georg Forster: Therese Huber: Briefe 1774-1803" appeared in Göttingische Gelehrte Anzeigen 254 (2002), pp. 109-124. She chaired the meeting of the steering committee of the Wolfenbütteler Arbeitskreis für Barockforschung in January 2003 and resigned from this committee after 18 years of service. She was elected to the executive committee of the MLA Division on German Literature to 1700 to serve a four-year. She is presently serving a two-year term as Vice-President of the Alexander von Humboldt Association of America. She is looking forward to her invitation to the University of Wroclaw, Poland and to her lecture series at the University of Graz during the remainder of her sabbatical year.

Nina Berman received a grant for the summer of 2003 to conduct research in Germany for her current project on Germany and the Middle East: A Cultural History, 900-2000 (Mershon Center, Ohio State University) In the fall of 2002 she was nominated by The Ohio State University for a grant from the Carnegie Corporation. Nina Berman published the review article "Questions of Context: Ibn Battuta and E.W. Bovill on Africa" in Research in African Literatures 34.2 (Summer 2003): 199-205 and the review of Koshar, Rudy. German Travel Cultures in German Studies Review 26.1 (February 2003): 130-31. She was invited to present the lecture "Deutschland und der Nahe Osten: Kulturgeschichtliche Überlegungen" by the Seminar für deutsche Philologie at the Universität Göttingen (July 8, 2003) as well as the lecture "Buber versus Herzl: Thoughts on German Zionism" which she presented at the Colloquium Series, Comparative Studies, Ohio State University, May 16, 2003. She also received invitations to speak about "Cultural and Religious Difference in Medieval Islamic Civilization" from the Congregation Tifereth Israel, Columbus, Ohio, February 26, 2003. On the topic "Modernizing Egypt: A Turkish-German Development Project" Nina Berman lectured at University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, September 12, 2002. In addition to these invited lectures she presented the following conference papers: "Herzl versus Buber: Zionism in the context of Germany's relationship to the Middle East." Annual meeting of the German Studies Association, New Orleans, September 18-21, 2003; "Black Hawk Down and Humanity of the Masters: American and German Views on Humanitarian Interventions in Somalia." Annual meeting of the African Studies Association, Washington, D.C., December 5-8, 2002; and "Kenya in contemporary German-language autobiographies: Internalist interpretations of the situation of women." Annual meeting of Society of Research on African Cultures, Montclair University, New Jersey, November 7-9, 2002. Nina Berman became associate editor of Research in African Literatures in August 2002, and she joined the editorial board of Weltengarten the same month. At OSU she was part of an initiative to write "A Humanities ResponseTo National Security Documents" which can be found on http://humanities.osu.edu/.

John E. Davidson enjoyed a year of Faculty Professional Leave in 2002-03, which he used to begin co-editing (with Sabine Hake) a book on German cinema in the 1950s and writing a study provisional entitled "Crossing Over: Shooting Films in Germany from 1924 to 1974. "During the past year his "Story of Faces and Intimate Spaces: Form and History in Max Färberböck's Aimee und Jaguar" (Quarterly Review of Film and Video Vol. 19, No. 3 [2002]: 323-41) and "Crime and the Cynical Solution: The Rebirth of Black Humor out of the Spirit of Self-Concern" [German Popular Cinema, ed. Randall Halle and Margaret McCarthy, [Detroit: Wayne State Press, 2003]: 259-79) appeared. He completed articles on "the mourning of labor" and on "visualizing global understanding" in German cinema since the 1960s, as well as on cinematic "coming to terms" since the Wende. In October 2002 he was invited to give "Against Rushing through Places that Ought to be Dwelt In: Wendepunkte and German Cinema" as the Keynote Address at the Focus on German Studies conference at the University of Cincinnati. He also presented several papers: "The Redemptive Space of the West for Recent German Cinema," European Cinema Research Forum, Bath (UK), April 2003; "From Locations and Landscapes to Lifts and Lobbies: The Shift to Post-Turnerian Vision in Wim Wenders' Recent 'America' Films," Conference of the Film and History Association, Kansas City, November 2002; and, "Frank Beyer's Spur der Steine and the Filming of the Abstract," GSA, San Diego, October 2002.

Helen Fehervary published "John Willett: The Artistry, Wit and Power of the Context," The Brecht Yearbook 28 (2003); "Heiner Müller's Representations of Hitler: The Bunker as topos for the Endpoint and the Terror of the New," Unmasking Hitler: Cultural Representations of Adolf Hitler from the Weimar Republic to the Present, ed. Klaus Berghahn and Jost Hermand (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003); "Der Internationalismus und die Kunst der Anna Seghers," Argonautenschiff:Jahrbuch der Anna-Seghers-Gesellschaft (Berlin: Aufbau Verlag, 2003); and another volume of the critical edition she is editing with Bernhard Spies of the Universität Mainz appeared: Anna Seghers, Die Entscheidung, volume editor Alexander Stephan, vol. I/7, A.S. Werkausgabe (Berlin: Aufbau Verlag, 2003). She presented "Deutschland unter anderem: Die Bedeutung des Internationalismus im Leben and Werk der Anna Seghers," Jahres-Tagung der Anna-Seghers-Gesellschaft: Biographie und Erfahrung, Meiningen, Germany (Oct. 31-Nov. 2, 2002); "History as Catastrophe and the Redemptive Power of Art: The German-Jewish Writer Anna Seghers," Ohio State University (March 12, 2003); "Common Visions and Parallel Constructions in the Early Works of Seghers and Brecht," International Brecht Society Symposium: mahagonny.com, Berlin (June 25-30, 2003); and moderated a panel on German theatre at the 27th Comparative Drama Conference, Ohio State University (April 24-26, 2003).

Bernd Fischer edited A Companion to the Works of Heinrich von Kleist. Rochester: Camden House, 2003, with an introductory essay: "Heinrich von Kleist's Life and Work." 1-18. He published "Heinrich von Kleists skeptisches Erzählen." Skepsis und literarische Imagination. Ed. Bernd Hüppauf & Klaus Vieweg (Munich: fink, 2003). 197-208 and "Jüdische Emanzipation und deutsche Nation: Von Mendelssohn zu Auerbach." 1848 und das Versprechen der Moderne. Ed. Jürgen Fohrmann & Helmut J. Schneider (Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann, 2003) and "Nations- und Revolutionsbegriffe in B. Travens Land des Frühlings." B. Traven the Writer. Ed. Jörg Thunecke. Nottingham: Sherwood Press, 2003. 429-43. He reviewed Dirk Grathoff, Kleist: Geschichte, Politik, Sprache. Aufsätze zu Leben und Werk Heinrich von Kleists (Wiesbaden: Westdeutscher Verlag, 2000). Monatshefte 95 (2003): 133-35. He presented "The Cosmic Race: B. Traven and Jose Vasconcelos," Modern Language Association, Annual Meeting, New York, 28 Dec. 2002; "Heine's 'Gespenster': Saul Ascher and Achim von Arnim," Modern Language Association, Annual Meeting, New York, 29 Dec. 2002; "Germanistik im 21. Jahrhundert: Perspektiven und Strategien," Chuo University, Tokyo, Japan, 27 Mar. 2003; "Probleme der Germanistik in den USA," Chuo University, Tokyo, Japan, 26 Mar. 2003; and he moderated the section "Politics and Culture," of the conference "Americanization and Anti-Americanism: The Impact of American Culture on Germany after 1945," Mershon Center, Ohio State University, Columbus, 18 Oct. 2002.

Kai Hammermeister published his monograph The German Aesthetic Tradition (Cambridge / New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002) as well as his articles "Ästhetik als begnadete Spätaufklärung: Zum Verhältnis von Kunstdiskurs und Glauben im ausgehenden achtzehnten Jahrhundert" (Journal of English and Germanic Philologies, July 2003) and "Kunstfeindschaft bei Kleist. Zum ästhetischen Diskurs in 'Die Heilige Cääcilie'" (Kleist-Jahrbuch 2002). He reviewed several books for The German Quarterly and presented the paper "Animal pictor: Zur Destruktion der künstlerischen Wahrheitszuschreibung" at the International Conference on Hermeneutics at the Universität Freiburg in July 2003.

Gregor Hens writes fiction, essays and commentary on cultural and literary issues in Germany. His most recent publications include a collection of short stories entitled Transfer Lounge (Hamburg: marebuch, 2003) and a short story entitled "John F. Kennedy und der Ausbruch des Irazu" (in: Die Besten 2003 -- Klagenfurter Texte. Piper, München, 2003). His next book, Matta verlässt seine Kinder, will appear in March 2004 at S. Fischer Verlag. Hens writes as a freelance author for Die Zeit and other German newspapers and continues his research in the area of modern and contemporary German and Austrian literature, as well as in his original area of training, linguistics.

Neil G. Jacobs, Associate Professor, Yiddish and Ashkenazic Studies Program (Ph.D. Columbia University). Recent publications include a coedited volume (with Brian D. Joseph, Johanna DeStefano, and Ilse Lehiste): When Languages Collide: Perspectives on Language Conflict, Language Competition, and Language Coexistence. (2003, The Ohio State University Press); an article "Soiree bei Kohn: Jewish Elements in the Repertoire of Hermann Leopoldi", Zutot 2002, pp. 200-208. Recent conference papers include: "Jewish speech and interwar Jewish cabaret", presented at: *Flashbacks: Two Cities in Dialogue—The Vienna Leopoldstadt and Chicago's Maxwell Street*, October 10-11, 2002, University of Illinois at Chicago; "Matrix language and code switching: Yiddish vs. 'not Yiddish'", presented at Germanic Linguistics Annual Conference [GLAC], April 25-27, SUNY Buffalo. Ongoing research activities are in three main areas: Yiddish linguistics; the ethnography of post-Yiddish speech; Jewish cabaret. During Autumn 2003 I am offering for the first time a course devoted to Jewish cabaret (as performed in German, Dutch, Yiddish, Polish, Russian, and English).

David Neal Miller was appointed to the Modern Language Association's Committee on Disability Issues in the Profession. He presented a paper on "Postmodern Yiddish" at the International Conference on Yiddish After the Holocaust at Oxford University in August 2003.

Paul Reitter presented his work at the German Studies Association meeting, West Virginia University's foreign languages colloquium, the American Jewish Studies Association meeting, the University of Illinois's Institute for Advanced Studies, the Twentieth-Century French Studies colloquium, a conference on Vienna and Berlin at the University of Pennsylvania and the Midwest Jewish Studies colloquium, among other venues. He published several reviews and review essays. His article, "Heine and the Discourse of Myth," appeared in Roger Cook (ed.), A Companion to the Works of Heinrich Heine (Rochester: Camden House, 2002).

Alexander Stephan published three edited books during the last academic year: Twentieth Century Prose. Alfred D&öblin, Arnold Zweig, Lion Feuchtwanger and Anna Seghers which appeared in New York with Continuum/Cassell as volume 68 of The German Library; Anna Seghers, Die Entscheidung, which is part of Seghers' Collected Works published by Aufbau Verlag in Berlin; and, together with Therese Hörnigk, Jeans, Rock und Vietnam. Amerikanische Kultur in der DDR [Jeans, Rock and Vietnam. American Culture in the German Democratic Republic] (Berlin: Theater der Zeit). For the first and third of these volumes he wrote introductions. The edition of Anna Seghers' novel is accompanied by a commentary of some 100 pages. A volume with the proceedings from an 2002 International Conference at the Mershon Center on 'Americanization and Anti-Americanism. The Impact of American Culture on Germany after 1945' was contracted for 2004 with Berghahn Publishing in New York. Among his recent articles and notes are an essay on the surveillance of Bertolt Brecht's telephone in Los Angeles, a chapter on the surveillance of German Exiles by the Embassy of the Third Reich in Paris, an introduction to the English translation of Alfred Döblin's novel Berlin Alexanderplatz, and several book for German and American journals. In March 2002 the program aspekte" of the Zweite Deutsche Fernsehen/ZDF aired the documentary film "Thomas Mann und der CIA" which is based on materials Stephan prepared.

Stephan lectured at various regional, national and international conferences and gave interviews for German and American media. He organized panels on American culture and anti-Americanism in Germany at the German Studies Association in San Diego and New Orleans and, for the International Brecht Society, prepared two panels at the Thirtieth Annual 20th-Century Literature Conference in Louisville, Kentucky. Stephan served as President of the Brecht Society. In 2002-3 he was reinvited by the Humboldt Foundation for research in Germany.

At Ohio State University he is a permanent member of the President's and Provost's Advisory Committee and serves on the Director's Advisory Committee of the Mershon Center, the Oversight Committee of the Institute for Collaborative Research and Public Humanities, the search committee for the Dean of the College of Humanities, the review committee of the Honors and Scholars Program and other OSU committees.

Currently, Stephan is working at the Mershon Center on the topic of cultural Americanization and anti-Americanism in Europe and the world. As part of this project he organized in October 2002 at OSU an international conference on Americanization and Anti-Americanism. The Impact of American Culture on Germany after 1945 and, with Jochen Vogt, a workshop on Amerikanisierung der deutschen Kultur - Problemfelder und Forschungsansätze which met at the Institute for Culture Studies in Essen, Germany. For September 2003 the Rothermere American Institute invited him to organize a conference at Oxford University on the topic American Culture in Europe. Americanisation & Anti-Americanism Since 1945. The twelve comparative country studies presented and discussed at this event, including Stephan's piece on Germany, will appear in book form in 2004. Other conferences on related topics will follow in December 2003 at Essen University and in March 2004 at the Institute for Culture Studies in Essen (both with Jochen Vogt).

At OSU Stephan initiated with the Area Studies Centers of the Office of International Affairs a series of five symposia on American culture and anti-Americanism in the world. The first of these meetings, Cultural Diplomacy and the Image of the United States Abroad, took place in May 2003, featuring the former two-term governor of Ohio, Richard Celeste, and a former U.S. Ambassador to the Netherlands, Cynthia Schneider. A second conference is scheduled in cooperation with the Middle East Studies Center for November 2003 on the topic of Cultural Americanization and Anti-Americanism. The Image of the United States in the Middle East, to be followed in February 2004 by a similar event organized in conjunction with the Center for Slavic and East European Studies at OSU.

In addition to support from the Mershon Center, Stephan secured outside and matching OSU funds for his projects on American culture and anti-Americanism in the world and for other research from the German Federal Ministry of Economics and Technology (Trans-Atlantic Program), the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (TransCoop Grant and Fellowship Program), the Rothermere American Institute at Oxford University, the Institute for Culture Studies and the University of Essen, Germany, the Max Kade Foundation and the German Academic Exchange Service, both in New York, as well as the Office of International Affairs at OSU.

Harry Vredeveld is proofreading vol. 1 of his annotated, critical edition The Poetic Works of Helius Eobanus Hessus (Renaissance Texts Series, co-published by the Renaissance Society of America and MRTS, Tempe, Arizona). He hopes to finish the second volume and produce a first draft of volume 3 during his sabbatical leave. In the past year he published his lecture "Eobanus Hessus in Krakau," in: Humanismus in Erfurt, Akademie gemeinnütziger Wissenschaften zu Erfurt. Acta Academiae Scientiarum 7, Humanismusstudien 1, ed. Gerlinde Huber-Rebenich and Walther Ludwig (Rudolstadt/Jena, 2002), pp. 161-176. He has also been actively publishing semi-diplomatic editions of texts by Eobanus Hessus in the "DFG-Projekt CAMENA: Neulateinische Dichtung im WWW" (http://www.uni-mannheim.de/mateo/start1.html). The texts published thus far are: DE RECESSU STUDENTUM EX ERPHORDIA tempore pestilenciae. Eobani Hessi Francobergii Carmen Heroicum (Erfurt: Wolfgang Stürmer, 1506); DE PUGNA STUDENTUM ERPHORDIENSIUM cum quibusdam coniuratis nebulonibus (Erfurt: Wolfgang Stürmer, 1506); DE LAUDIBUS ET PRAECONIIS INCLITI ATQUE TOCIUS GERMANIAE celebratissimi Gymnasii litteratorii apud Erphordiam (Erfurt: Wolfgang Stürmer, 1507); De Amantium infoelicitate Contra Venerem de Cupidinis impotentia et versu et soluta oratione Opusculum Erphordiense (Erfurt: Johannes Knappe, 1508); Bucolicon (Erfurt: Johannes Knappe, 1509); Encomium Nuptiale divo Sigismundo Regi Poloniae Scriptum (Cracow: Johannes Haller, 1512); Sylvae duae nuper aeditae Prussia et Amor [Leipzig: Melchior Lotter, 1514]; Heroidum Christianarum Epistolae (Leipzig: Melchior Lotter, 1514); HYMNUS PASCHALIS. NUPER Ex Erphurdiensi. Gymnasio Christianae Victoriae Acclamatus (Erfurt: Johannes Knappe the Elder, 1515); De Vera Nobilitate. et priscis Germanorum moribus Ad Georgium Spalatinum Libellus Carmine Elegiaco [Erfurt: Mathes Maler, 1515?]; DE VITANDA Ebrietate Elegia. Additis super eadem re aliquot Epigrammatis (Erfurt: Mathes Maler, 1516); Epistola Italiae ad Divum Maximilianum Caes. Aug. Ulricho Hutteno Equite Germano Autore; Responsio Maximiliani Aug. Helio Eobano Hesso Autore (Erfurt: Mathes Maler, 1516); Victoria Christi ab Inferis (Erfurt: Mathes Maler, 1517); A profectione ad Des. Erasmum Roterodamum Hodoeporicon Carmine Heroico (Erfurt: Mathes Maler, [1519]); In Eduardum LEEUM QUORUNDAM E SODALITATE LITERARIA ERPHURDIENSI ERASMICI NOMINIS STUDIOSORUM EPIGRAMMATA (Erfurt: Joh. Knappe, 1520); DE NON CONTEMNENDIS Studiis humanioribus futuro Theologo maxime necessariis aliquot clarorum virorum ad Eobanum Hessum Epistolae (Erfurt: Mathes Maler, 1523); In poetam Sarmatam Germanos ignaviae insimulantem invectiva [Erfurt:Mathes Maler, 1523]; and: Dialogi Tres (Erfurt: Mathes Maler, 1524).

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GLL lectures and other events in 2002~2003

A Graduate Student Conference entitled Americanization and Anti-Americanism: The Impact of American Culture on Germany After 1945 was held on October 16th and 17th. Organizer: Andrea Heitmann; Panel Chairs: Kristy Boney, Michaela Peroutkova, Sai Bhatawadekar, and Norm Hirschy.

Professor Alexander Stephan organized a Conference on Americanization and Anti-Americanism: The Impact of American Culture on Germany After 1945 from the 18th to the 20th of October, 2002. Moderators for the 5 sessions were: Professor Mary Ellen O'Connell (Ohio State University), Professor Bernd Fischer (Ohio State University), Professor Jochen Vogt (Universität Essen), Dr. Therese Hörnigk (Director, Literaturforum, Berlin), and Dr. Monika K. Aring (Executive Director, Center on Education and Training for Employment, Ohio State University).

Dr. Therese Hörnigk (Direktor, Literaturforum im Brecht-Haus, Berlin) gave a lecture entitled PEN im Visier der Staatssicherheit on October 22, 2002 at the Max Kade German House.

A German film evening took place at the Max Kade German House on October 23, 2002. The screening of Der Bewegte Mann (1994), a comedy from Soenke Wortmann, with Katja Riemann, Til Schweiger, Rufus Beck, Joachim Krol, and Armin Rohde (based on the book by Soenke Wortmann und Ralf Koenig), was organized by Norm Hirschy and co-sponsored by the Office of Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Student Services.

The second annual Halloween Poetry Reading took place on October 30th in the Max Kade German House. A big thank you to Norm Hirschy for organizing it this year. On the spooky, gloomy evening of Oct. 30th, the German Department held its second annual Halloween Poetry Reading, and the event was every bit as hauntingly entertaining as it was last year. Readings were done not only by graduate students and professors, but also by beginning level students as well. The events linguistic repertoire was expanded to cover three languages this year, including German, Swedish and Latvian. After the readings, participants treated themselves to a trick-or-treat smorgasbord of cookies and hot apple cider.

Another German film evening on November 13, 2002 was held in conjunction with an introductory meeting about the German club at the Max Kade German House. Sara Elder and Daniela Sefz worked with Norm Hirschy to show Wir können auch anders ... and to recruit interested individuals for the German club.

On November 19th and 20th, Professor Wilhelm Vosskamp presented two lectures entitled Kulturwissenschaften am Beispiel der Text-Bild-Beziehungen and Bildung ist mehr als Wissen. Die Bildungsdiskussion in historischer Perspektive.

An official German club event - a Weihnachtsparty - was enjoyed by undergraduates, graduates, and Professors on December 6, 2002. The Max Kade German House was filled with song and laughter. Nikolaus (Kurt Wellhäuβer) gave out gifts and OSU rowing team members from Germany baked Plätzchen. Afterwards, a group of undergraduates braved the freezing temperatures and drove to the Striezelmarkt, where Ben Parrot met the vendor from Saxony whom he had been helping. He was presented with a Räuchermännchen for his efforts.

The Department co-sponsored a German Wortbeat Kabarett: "Deutsch is dada" on December 1, 2002. The duo of Faltsch Wagoni, who are Silvana Prosperi and Thomas Busse, entertained Columbus' German-speaking community.

The German Club screened Sonnenallee on January 29, 2003. The film brought undergraduates to the Max Kade German house for the year's first Filmabend. On February 20, Viktor Vogel: Commercial Man was shown. And the following week, the club organized a Fasching Party.

Professor Joseph Salmons from the University of Wisconsin-Madison spoke on February 24, 2003. His talk focused on "How and why German-speaking communities in the U.S. became monolingual English-speaking." This lecture was co-sponsored by the Department of Linguistics and the Endangered and Minority Languages Working Group of the Institute for Collaborative Research and Public Humanities.

Professor Jonathan Kalb (CUNY - Hunter College) presented slides and lectured on "Marathon Mensch: Peter Stein's 21-hour Faust" on February 28, 2003. The Department of Theatre was the co-sponsor.

Professor Abe Socher (History, Oberlin College) gave a lecture on March 10, 2003 entitled "A Bildungsroman without Bildung? Competing Ideals in Solomon Maimon's Autobiography and in the German and Jewish Enlightenments."

Our very own Professor Helen Fehervary gave the fifth of the College of Humanities 2002-2003 Inaugural Lectures on March 11 entitled: "History of Catastrophe and the Redemptive Power of Art: The Case of the German-Jewish Writer Anna Seghers."

In April, the German Club presented another Filmabend "Nosferatu: Phantom der Nacht" and in May, "Monsters, Inc." was shown dubbed in German.

The film "Slaughterhouse Five" was shown on April 18th in preparation for "Eyewitness to History," a lecture by Gifford Doxsee, Professor Emeritus (History, Ohio University) on April 25, 2003.

On April 28, this year's Distinguished Max Kade Visiting Professor, Michael Rohrwasser, gave a lecture on "Lessing und Preußen."

Sara Pugach (Assistant Professor of History, OSU - Lima) presented a lecture entitled "Between Christian Empathy and Racist Biology: The Question of African Languages in Germany and South Africa, ca. 1900-1936" on May 12, 2003.

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Graduate Student News 2002~2003

Autumn ~ Summer Awards and Honors

Kristy Boney received the Graduate Student Research Paper Award in June 2003.
Patricia Sanda will travel to Berlin as the FU Fellow for the 2003-2004 academic year.
Jarrod Shepard was chosen for the 2003~2004 Humboldt Fellowship.

Degrees and Candidacy Examinations

M.A.s

Norm Hirschy, M.A.
May 23, 2003
Denknotwendigkeiten - History, Homosociality and the Contesting of Masculinity in Der Untertan and Die Verwirrungen des Zöglings Törless
Prof. Fehervary - advisor

Kurt Wellhäußer, M.A.
May 22, 2003
Prof. Grotans - advisor

Heidi Harrison-Bingham, M.A.
May 19, 2003
Prof. Vredeveld - advisor

Nicholas Spitulski, M.A.
May 19, 2003
Prof. Grotans - advisor

Wray Withers, M.A.
May 19, 2003
Prof. Fischer - advisor

Kent Broestl, M.A.
November 22, 2002
Faith, The Sacraments and Providence in Elisabeth Langgässer's Das Unauslöschliche Siegel
Prof. Hammermeister - advisor

Ph.D. Candidacy Exams

Lijun Feng, M.A.
March 29, 2003
Prof. Berman - advisor

Colleen McCallum-Bonar, M.A.
March 27, 2003
Prof. Miller - advisor

Kristy Boney, M.A.
March 14, 2003
Prof. Fehervary - advisor

Patricia Sanda, M.A.
March 6, 2003
Prof. Fischer - advisor

Ph.Ds - Dissertations

Nik Sathe, Ph.D.
May 23, 2003
Authenticity and the Critique of Tourism in Postwar Austrian Literature
Prof. Davidson - advisor

Graduate Student News 2002~2003

Sai Bhatawadekar is currently writing on her PhD on German philosophy around and after Romanticism and its connection with ancient Indian philosophy, concentrating on Schopenhauer and Hegel and their reception of Hinduism and Buddhism. Besides teaching German, she developed elementary and intermediate Hindi language and culture courses for the first time ever for Ohio State University. Her recent conference papers include Schopenhauer's Philosophy through Oriental Eyes: His Selective Referencing of the Orient and the Resulting Inconsistencies, American Oriental Society Annual Meeting, October 2003. Her Hero, Her Villain: Malina's Screen Presence in Werner Schroeter's Film Malina, 14th Annual Graduate Student Conference "Heros and Villians", Yale University, April 2003. Rewriting the Orient: Schopenhauer's (mis)use of Hindu and Buddhist concepts, Kentucky Foreign Language Conference on "Border Crossing", April 2003. Racial Determinism through Language?: Humboldt's Theory of Linguistic World-view, Twenty-Seventh Annual Colloquium on Literature and Film, West Virginia University, October 2002.

Kristy Boney completed her doctoral candicacy exams at the end of March 2003 and is now working on her dissertation prospectus. In October 2002 she presented a paper entitled "Was Thomas Wolfe Fascist?" at West Virginia University and in April 2003 she participated in a graduate student conference at Yale University where she presented a paper on myth in Ingeborg Bachmann's "Der Fall Franza". Her most recent achievement, however, was her selection to compete in the OSU Edward Hayes Research Forum where she won second place with her paper entitled: "Don't Drink the Water: The Function of Topography in Anna Seghers and Joseph Conrad."

Erol Boran hails from Germany's deep south and holds an MA from the University of Würzburg. He just returned from a scholarship year at the FU Berlin, sandwiched by two summer courses taught at the TU Dresden. During his stay in Germany, he finished research for his dissertation on Turkish German Theater and Performance, which he desperately hopes to finish by next summer. It has been an eventful year for Erol: He met and interviewed a row of well-known Turkish-German artists, visited performances and archives all around Germany and presented a conference paper on Turkish-German Kabarett. But more than anything else he simply took in the multiculturally charged air of Germany's largest metropolis and its notoriously Turkish Kreuzberger Nächte. In comparison, Columbus now feels strangely dwarfed to Erol, but he is confident that his dissertation in combination with the position as resident director of the Max Kade German House will keep his mind occupied.

Sanna Erhardt finished her M.A. thesis "Teaching the Tales. Literature and Second Language Teaching: An Integrated Approach Employing Fairy Tales" in summer 2003 and now begins her PhD, probably in the field of children's and juvenile literature. She is also starting a Scandinavian Club together with her students at OSU and invites everyone with an interest in Scandinavia to join!

During the past year, Kathleen Hallihan has been busy writing her dissertation, "Envisioning an Ideal Nation: The Literary Politics of Bettina von Arnim in pre-1848 Prussia," which she plans to defend in Fall 2003. On a related note, her article, "Following Bonaparte: Images of Napoleon in the Works of Bettina von Arnim," will soon be published in Issue 36.2 of Colloquia Germanica.

In areas of professional development, Kathleen will continue on as the Preparing Future Faculty Program Coordinator at the OSU Graduate School. This nationally recognized program prepares graduate students for their upcoming job searches and ensuing careers as junior faculty members through on-campus workshops and one-on-one mentoring with outstanding senior faculty members from area liberal arts institutions. Kathleen will also be serving another year as a German Instructor for the Department of Continuing Education's three-course Conversational German Series. On a more personal note, Kathleen and her husband, Jason, are expecting their first child on March 1, 2004.

Andrea Heitmann spent last year at the Humboldt Universität in Berlin, where she pursued research and began to write her dissertation. She published an article on "Körperlichkeit und Sexualität in Sophie von La Roches' Geschichte des Fräuleins von Sternheim" in Amsterdamer Beiträge zur Neueren Germanistik (Amsterdam: Rodopi 55 (2003) and is currently working on a review of Helmut Koopmanns Goethe und Frau von Stein: Geschichte einer Liebe for the German Quarterly as well as on an article for an anthology on the artistic and intellectual interpretation of September 11 in Germany. In October 2003, she will present a paper on the reactions of the so-called 'Popliteraten' on 9/11 at the RMMLA convention in Missoula, Montana. While in Germany, Andrea presented a paper on the reactions of German intellectuals to the terrorist attacks on September 11 at a conference at the Kulturwissenschaftliches Institut (KWI) in Essen, Germany and she was invited to give a lecture on German intellectual discourse communities on America at the Universität Lüneburg, Germany. In July 2003, Andrea co-organized an inter-disciplinary graduate student conference in Germany hosted by the Kulturwissenschaftliches Institut Essen (KWI).

After completing the Master's examination in May of 2003, Wray Withers enjoyed a whirlwind summer which culminated in a brief, ill-fated appearance at the New York City International Fringe Festival. In the the upcoming quarters, she plans to further investigate her interests in film, drama and women's studies and will teach 103.01.

New faces in the department!

~ Natascha Miller

Each year, in my duties as Graduate Secretary, I have the pleasure of being one of the first members of the department to become acquainted with our incoming graduate students. Through e-mail exchanges, we work together in conquering the somewhat challenging application process here at Ohio State. Of over two dozen applicants for the 2003-2004 academic year, the eleven individuals listed below were accepted by the Graduate Studies Committee, and I happily introduce them to you here:

Erin Cary is this year's Blume Fellow. She has "always viewed life through a literary lens," and believes that "literature has brought both academic and life lessons into sharper focus." Erin is in the M.A. program.

Andrea Cheney comes to us from Miami University, where she appreciated "the great and often underestimated value of a liberal education." She is in the M.A. program.

Andrea Franken arrives from the University of Bonn after earning a Master's in Applied Linguistics. Following her year here, she intends to work on her doctorate back in Germany.

Claudia Galberg graduated from the University of Arizona with an M.A. degree. Here, she is working on her Ph.D. by researching "the historical background of the ever problematic German-Jewish relationship."

Doug Gill has an M.A. from Bowling Green State University and plans on "exploring the myth of a monolithic German culture in a thesis on multiculturalism and identity using minority literature written in German since the 1980s."

Neele Hagemann, our FU-Berlin Exchange Student, is currently studying in the Department of History, where she hopes to explore African-American, European, Jewish, and American History.

Anja Heidenreich was our FU-Berlin Exchange Student last year. She is now a GTA in German, intends to write an M.A. thesis centered on slavery in Charleston, South Carolina during the Antebellum period and wants to pursue a career in second-language acquisition.

Annett Krause returns to us to finish her M.A. here after completing an M.A. program in Ancient History at the Dresden University of Technology.

Weijia Li, from the Beijing Second Foreign Language University, arrives with 8 years of university teaching experience under his belt. In his master's studies here, he hopes to "benefit from the experience in transcultural communication, especially in the sense of exchange of research approaches and perspectives of three different cultures."

Currently studying in Berlin, Jarrod Shepherd hails from Texas originally. In the M.A. program here, he wants to study orientalism and 20th century literature as well as explore his interests in Linguistics, Translation Studies, and Medieval Studies.

Charlie Vannette joins us from Tucson, Arizona. He is particularly interested in Viennese culture around 1900 and is also fascinated with local dialects and how they express the distinctness of a people. Charlie is in the M.A. program.

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Undergraduate Student News 2002~2003

Awards and Honors in 2003

Congratulations to Linda Long-Van Brocklyn, who won the Diane M. Cummins award for Outstanding Achievement in Yiddish.

Kathleen Artman won the Austrian Teaching Fulbright Award and will be spending the upcoming year in Linz.

Claire Doughty and Ben Parrot won the Undergraduate Student Essay Competition.

A $4,000 Undergraduate Research Scholarship from the College of the Arts and Sciences Honors Committee was garnered by Sarah H. Elder for her project entitled: "Study of Changes in Vowel Perception by Students in a Sheltered Short-Term German Study Abroad Program" (Professor Kathy Corl - Advisor). Sarah also won the Katherine L. Hall Prize.

Erin Merhar won a Huntington Fellowship and was accepted by CDS for placement in an internship in Germany for the summer.

Erin Wilfong won the Dieter Cunz Award in June and then won the ASC Undergraduate Research Award.

Congratulations to Ben Parrot, whose research project entitled The Devil's Arithmetic: Math Textbooks in Nazi Germany received First Prize in the Humanities/Business category at the Denman Undergraduate Research Forum (Professor Anna Grotans - Advisor). Ben was the only finalist to win from OSU in the Mellon Fellow Competition. He was asked to present a paper based on his thesis at the NCUR conference as well as at the College of Humanities Undergraduate Research Colloquium this past year. He was the student speaker at the Student Achievement Honors Reception and won the ASC Undergraduate Research Award. In Autumn of 2003, Ben will begin graduate work in German at the University of Wisconsin.

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Staff News 2002~2003

Daniela Sefz began her second year this past Autumn quarter. Daniela is now a Sophomore and has become invaluable here in Cunz 314 as our Receptionist and Front Office Assistant. In addition, she has been instrumental in revitalizing the German Club with the help of her fellow classmates.

Early in the year, Brenda was nominated for the Dean's Outstanding Staff Award and later, Natascha was nominated for an Above and Beyond the Call award.

Brenda has recently taken over the duties of advising the Ohio State student chapter of Amnesty International USA. The initial meeting gave her the opportunity to meet the group, and she was impressed by the positive attitude of the members. Over the summer, Natascha completed the bulk of the new GLL Web site with the aid of Jody Jones in Humanities Information Services. Our new site went up in September, and Natascha is now fine-tuning the html code and attending Graduate Admissions workshops to keep up her skills.

We are all looking forward to our impending move to Hagerty Hall during the 2004 Winter Break, although we fully realize that the chaos will be a challenge. Much of the upcoming year will no doubt be devoted to sorting, reorganizing, and making decisions as to what to take and what to leave behind.

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Alumnae/i News 2003~2004

Tom Baginski (Ph.D. 1990) Associate Professor of German at the College of Charleston in Charleston, SC and Director of the German Program: www.cofc.edu/~german/german.html since 2000.
News: His encyclopedia entry "Said," will appear in November 2003 in Multicultural Writers since 1945: An A-to-Z Guide. Ed. Alba Della Fazia Amoia and Bettina Liebowitz Knapp. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2003 is forthcoming in November 2003. He recently published "Von Mullahs und Deutschen: Annäherung an das Werk des iranischen Exillyrikers Said." German Quarterly, 74.1 (2001): 21-35; "Traumerfahrung als Erkenntnisweg: Oskar Loerkes Gedicht, "Die Hand." Monatshefte, 93.2 (2001): 145-58; and the encyclopedia entry "Gino Chiellino" in Encyclopedia of German Literature. Ed. Matthias Konzett. 2 vols. Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers, 2000. Vol. 1: 186-88. He presented: "Resistance in Exile: The German Writings of the Iranian Author Said," 25th Annual Meeting of the Philological Association of the Carolinas, Charleston, SC, March 3, 2001; "Practical Ways of Closing the Gap in the Classroom: Teaching German Through the Internet," 2000 South Atlantic Modern Language Association, Birmingham, Alabama, November 11, 2000.

David Caldwell (M.A. 1978, Ph.D. 1986)
News: In June 2003 I presented a paper at Humboldt Universität in Berlin as part of the conference "Mahagonny.com" organized by the International Brecht Society. In August 2003 I was appointed to a three-year term as Chair of the Department of Foreign Languages at the University of Northern Colorado. Greetings from Colorado to all the folks in Cunz Hall!

Sam Carle (Spring 2002) minored in German and now lives and works in Hessen.
News: After spending most of 2001 interning at a Golf Course in a small village in Hessen called Willershausen (a part of the larger Herleshausen), I finished my degree in Journalism and am now living near Frankfurt am Main teaching English to German students (mostly business - but some private).

Randall Condra (1990) He has been working as a freelance German-English translator in Columbus for the past 5 years.
News: Mr. Condra exhibited his watercolor paintings in a one-man show in the foyer of the Upper Arlington Public Library in September. He returned to painting in July 2002 after an absence of nearly 30 years, hence the title of the exhibition, "Thirty Years without Art." Mr. Condra's formal art training consists of just one art class during his freshman year in high school. After painting and drawing sporadically for the next few years, he gave up art when he joined the Army in 1974. He resurrected his hobby in 2002 and is now a professional artist. After being shown at the Rhodes Tower in downtown Columbus in October & November, more artwork by Randall Condra was exhibited in two locations in Upper Arlington through the end of 2003. His original watercolors are on display at the law offices of Kim M. Halliburton-Cohen & Associates. Prints of his watercolors can be seen in the cafe at Borders Books (Kenny & Henderson). His appealing still lifes and landscapes reflect Mr. Condra's simple approach to painting: "to paint pretty pictures." Contact him at: 4153 Chadbourne Dr., Columbus, OH 43220; Tel. 614 457-9376; E-mail. barcon@earthlink.net

Jenifer Cushman (M.A., Ph.D. 1996)
News: The most exciting news is that I've been asked to direct an innovative, new study abroad opportunity that would enable the entire sophomore class to travel abroad for a month every May for no additional cost to the students. We're calling it the "Big Idea" for now. I chaired a task force last year that worked out the details of the three-year pilot program, which was passed in Campus Assembly in May. Since then, we have garnered funding enough for the first pilot group: sixty of next year's incoming class will travel May 2006. In other news, I'm nearing completion of a book on the national topography of early twentieth-century Prague as portrayed in the works of Jaroslav Hasek, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Franz Kafka, and am working together with others to stimulate the German presence at the Midwest Modern Language Association conference. On the personal front, my husband Matt Dingo and I are looking forward to our daughter Halina's upcoming birthday: if you ask her, she'll tell you she's turning two, is going to have a big party, and wants a doll.

Yogini Joglekar (Ph.D. 2002) From May 2003, Yogini is Academic Director of the Mountbatten Internship Programme, a one-year work-study program that is based in New York and affiliated to the University of Cambridge, UK.
News: As Visiting Assistant Professor at St Mary's College of Maryland during AY 2002-2003, Yogini organized a film and lecture series on post-Wall German culture. With a St Mary's faculty grant, she presented a paper on Doris Doerrie's film, Happy Birthday, Tuerke! at the NEMLA convention. Yogini was an invited participant in the Hollins German Film Colloquium in Summer 2003. Her articles on Mira Nair's Monsoon Wedding and Jutta Bräckner's Hungerjahre are being published in WerkstattGeschichte and the anthology Reel Food respectively.

David Limburg (Ph.D. 1992) Associate Professor of German at Guilford College, where I've been for ten years, since graduating from OSU.
News: Laura and I and our two children, Kai (11) and Elin (8), are doing well and still enjoying the south (with summers in the north). For the last two years, I have been developing and using my own self-published, first-year German textbook: "Mal was Neues: A New Approach to Learning German." The book is working very well in my own classes and I'm hoping a publisher might get interested in it sometime soon.

Barbara Mabee (Ph.D. 1988) currently chairs the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures at Oakland University.
News: Professor Mabee has recently published a journal artice: "What's Good for the University?" Oakland Journal 4 (Spring 2002): 112-114 and a book chapter: "'Die Republik ist im Kampf entstanden!": Antihelden und der Wechsel der Zeit als "leichte[s] Umschalten eines Relais" in Kerstin Hensels Gipshut. An der Jahrtausendwende. Schlaglichter auf die deutsche Literatur. Eds. Christine Cosentino, Wolfgang Ertl, and Wolfgang Müller. Berlin: Europäischer Verlag der Wissenschaften 2003. 101-115. She has reviewed Bahti, Timothy and Merilyn Sibley Fries, eds. Jewish Writers, German Literature: The Uneasy Examples of Nelly Sachs and Walter Benjamin. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1995. In Colloquia Germanica 34.3/4 (2001): 351-354 and participated in three conferences: "Christa Wolfs Erzählung 'Leibhaftig' (2002) als Spurensuche und Versuch eines Rückblicks auf die Endzeit der DDR." 34th Annual Convention of Northeast Modern Language Association, Boston, Massachusetts, March 6-9, 2003; "What Does It Mean to be Competent in Diversity?" Fifth Annual Diverse Voices Conference, Oakland University, Rochester, MI, March 15, 2003 (Faculty Representative); "Power and Oppression in Christa Wolf's Medea: A Modern Retelling (1996)," 24th International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts, Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, March 19-23, 2003. In addition, she chaired two sessions in 2003: "Orientation Processes in German Literature(s) After Unification II." 34th Annual Convention of Northeast Modern Language Association, Boston, Massachusetts, March 6-9, 2003; and "Transference in Art and Literature." 24th International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts, Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, March 19-23, 2003.

Barbara Mennel (M.A. in Germanic Languages and Literatures 1991 & M.A. in Women's Studies 1992) I received my Ph.D. in German Studies at Cornell University in 1998, after which I spent a year as visiting assistant professor of German at Bates College in Maine. I am now a tenure-track assistant professor of German Studies and International Cinema in the Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.
News: I just spent the academic year 2002-3 as a member of the Beatrice M. Bain Research Group at the University of California, Berkeley where I worked on my book-project: "When History Meets Fantasy: Configurations of Masochism." My most recent publications are: "Local Funding and Global Movement: Minority Women's Filmmaking and the German Film Landscape of the Late 1990s," Women in German Yearbook 18 (2002): 45-66 and "White Law and the Missing Black Body in Fritz Lang's 'Fury' (1936)" Quarterly Review of Film and Video 20, 3 (July-September 2003): 203-223. My e-mail address is: mennel@umbc.edu

Folke-Christine Möller-Sahling (Ph.D. 2002) currently in her third year as an Assistant Professor of German & Humanities at the University of Southern Indiana.
News: Christine continues her research on epistolarity. Last spring, she gave presentations on the love letter at conferences in the United Kingdom and Germany. She also presented a paper and gave a poetry reading of Lisa Kahn's poetry at the annual Symposium of the "Society for German-American Studies" in Baltimore in April. Christine concludes her recent summer research in Germany with a talk on "Letters to the Front: Women's WW II Correspondence" at a conference on "Women, War and Peace" in Connecticut in October. A book chapter is forthcoming in 2004, entitled: "Paper is such an Unfaithful Messenger: Intimacy and Gender in the Eighteenth-Century Letter." Communication "Media" Intimacy. Ed. Eva Wyss. New York: John Benjamins Publishing Company. She is also preparing to give a talk at the annual Indiana Foreign Language Teachers Association Conference in November entitled "Von Strandkörben und Wattwanderungen": Teaching Culture through Children's and Youth Literature" in Indianapolis. This semester, Christine is developing and teaching Second-Year German Language courses at USI as Online-Learning Courses with the aid of a SBC Ameritech Grant for the academic year 2003-2004. She would love to have visitors in Evansville any time! Just drop her a line at moeller@usi.edu or call (812) 853-2661.

Carol Ludtke Prigan (Ph.D. 1991)
News: I am in my fifth year as a real estate salesperson with HER Real Living in the Columbus area. I also recently became the training director for the Northeast Regional office in Westerville, the largest office in the company. I train and mentor new sales agents and assist the office manager with other tasks. I serve on the Board of Directors for Columbus Housing Partnership, a non-profit agency dedicated to serving the affordable housing needs of central Ohio. I also serve on the affordable housing committee of the Columbus Board of Realtors (CBR), and I am vice chair of the residential education committee at CBR. Next year I will serve as vice chair of the affordable housing forum of the Ohio Association of Realtors, and move into the chair position in 2005. Although I have a strong commitment to affordable housing, I have sold homes in all price ranges all over central Ohio. My husband Scott, our daughter Rosa, and I make our home in northeast Columbus.

Ester Riehl (Ph.D. 1997) Adjunct instructor of German at the University of Delaware.
News: For the last four years, I have taught English as a Second Language for La Comunidad Hispana of Kennett Square, PA. I am the faculty director of the UD Study Abroad Program in Bayreuth for January 2004.

Egon Schwarz (M.A. 1951) Professor Schwarz is the Rosa May Distinguished University Professor Emeritus in the Humanities and professor emeritus of Germanic Languages and Literatures at Washington University in St. Louis.
News: He recently received an honorary doctorate from the University of Örebro, Sweden, and his autobiography has been published in English: Refuge. Chronicle of a Flight from Hitler (Riverside: Ariadne Press, 2002. isbn 157241104X).

Amy Kepple Strawser (MA 1982, Ph.D. 1991) (Otterbein College) presented "From the Fringe towards the Center: Post-war and Contemporary German Poetry by Women" at the Women in German Conference in Rio Rico, Arizona, Oct. 18, 2002.

Susan Lancaster Vonderhaar (M.A.1978) Sue is a news editor at the Cincinnati Enquirer, where she will mark 19 years this fall. She edits primarily national and international news. In her spare time she continues to dabble in foreign languages.
News: She spent much of last year studying Spanish and took an intensive course, with family stay, in San Andres, Guatemala, in January. She is also studying Arabic (and tries to keep up with her German).

Jennifer William (Ph.D. 2002) I am in my second year as Assistant Professor at Purdue University, and am enjoying teaching undergraduate and graduate courses on twentieth-century literature and film.
News: This past summer I took a trip to Berlin for research and pleasure. In other news, Colin is now in Indiana full time, as he has recently been hired as Assistant Professor of Psychology and Program Chair at Ivy Tech State College in Lafayette.

Barbara Walter Murtagh (M.A. 1979) We were saddened to hear that Barbara passed away in California on September 7, 2002 after a valiant battle with primary peritoneal carcinoma. She earned her B.A. in German from Oberlin College, and after earning her M.A. at OSU, she lived abroad for a year to teach English and travel. Our condolences to her daughters Anna and Carol and their families and to Barbara's best friend in the world, Debbie Hunsberger.

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Graduates of the Department, what have you been doing?

Please use the link on our Web site if you would like to see your update in next year's GLL Newsletter !

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Join the Friends of the Department
of Germanic Languages and Literatures

If you would like to become a friend of the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures and contribute, please make your check payable to the "The Ohio State University," indicate the desired fund (see below), and mail it to the Chair, Dept. of Germanic Languages and Literatures, 498 Hagerty Hall, 1775 College Rd., Columbus, OH 43210-1340. If you prefer to donate through a secure, online connection, you can find the name of each fund on our homepage [http://germanic.osu.edu].
Our sincere thanks to all past donors. We appreciate your continued support!

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Content Owner: N. Miller.