Department of Germanics Summer 2014 Newsletter

From the Outgoing Chair

Dear Friends of Germanics,

I am writing to you today to introduce our new e-news which we hope to send to you twice a year to keep you up to date about the department. This is also my last communication to you as chair as I am retiring from that position this summer and look forward to an entire year of sabbatical, reading and writing about my new passion, the environmental humanities. I also hope to do some traveling. Our new chair is Brigitte Prutti who will be in touch with you again in the fall. Brigitte is a scholar of eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth century drama, Austrian literature and culture, and contemporary German-language writing. Originally from near Graz, she is looking forward to accompanying a group of students on our annual Spring in Vienna program in 2015.

When you scroll through the list of topics in this e-news, you will find a wonderful array of stories ranging from introducing our 2014 graduating class and the two recipients of the annual Lufthansa awards, current and former students' accomplishments, news from students who study and research abroad, faculty research, a profile of our annual guest professor in the spring, Joe Voyles's retirement, and new and innovative programming. Read just the stories that appeal to you or read them all--they testify to our strength and vitality as one of the leading language programs on campus and, indeed, nationwide. Please join me in welcoming Brigitte to the community of friends of Germanics.

Wish best wishes,
Sabine Wilke


Sabine Wilke, 2014 convocation

 

Vienna – A city of Museums, Theaters and Cafés Spring in Vienna Program 2014   Every year the Department of Germanics provides students the opportunity to spend on quarter abroad in Vienna. This year sixteen students took advantage of the departments’ most popular program studying German onsite and learning about the Austria’s rich cultural history. Here is what some students had to say: “I have had an absolutely amazing time here in Vienna over the past two months and have experienced so much… Read more
The Department of Germanics is excited to announce that Sam Hylton and Katie McKeever are the winners of the second annual Lufthansa Award for Excellence in German Studies. The Award—a free round-trip ticket on Lufthansa to Germany for each student—was presented at the Departmental convocation on June 14, 2014. Sam and Katie were selected for outstanding… Read more
 The Department of Germanics congratulates the 2013-2014 graduating class on their academic achievements. A convocation ceremony for our graduating majors, minors, MAs and PhDs was held on Saturday, June 14th.  It was followed by a reception in the Walter Chapin Simpson Center for the Humanities. We wish our graduates all the best, and look forward to reading about their adventures and successes on the pages of this website! Bachelor… Read more
Recent UW graduate Lena Heilmann (PhD 2014) has accepted a position as Visiting Assistant Professor at Knox College, a four-year private liberal arts college in Illinois, for the 2014-15 academic year. She looks forward to teaching German language and literature courses, including a topics course on the representation of masks and veils in German literature, film, and art. Lena just received her doctorate with a dissertation entitled "Re-modeling the Frauenzimmer: Women-Authored Spaces… Read more
Joe Voyles received his doctoral degree in German Linguistics from the University of  Indiana in 1965.  In the fall of that year he joined  the faculty of the Department of Germanics here at the University of Washington. This was the beginning of  an illustrious career marked by significant contributions to our body of knowledge of the Germanic languages and, more broadly, to the field of Proto-Indo-European linguistics as such. This brilliance has been recognized as such throughout Joe’s… Read more
Max Kade Distinguished Visiting Professor Claudia Benthien (University of Hamburg) has recentlyreturned to Germany after having taught a Graduate seminar on “Literarizität in der Medienkunst” (The Literariness of New Media Art) at the Department of Germanics in the spring term. The course investigated the potential of an analysis of new media art from the perspective of literary studies. The guiding concept was “literariness” or “poeticness“, as developed by Russian Formalism and later… Read more
Former Department of Germanics student Tobias Gruenthal has recently finished his Master in Teaching at the UW's College of Education. Tobias is now a state-accredited World Languages teacher in secondary education. He will spend the remainder of spring adding an endorsement for teaching English as a foreign language to his portfolio before he begins teaching German at a Seattle High School this fall. Congratulations and well done, Tobi!
A century before psychoanalytic discourse codified a scientific language to describe the landscape of the mind, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe explored the paradoxes of an interior self separate from a conscious self. Though long acknowledged by the developers of depth psychology and by its historians, Goethe's literary rendering of interiority has not been the subject of detailed analysis in itself. Goethe's Allegories of Identity examines how Goethe created the essential bridge between… Read more
Alex writes: "I am truly grateful for the wonderful education I received  at UW German!  I am very much enjoying my time here at Berkeley. The weather is, as one would imagine, very nice, but perhaps more importantly, I feel that the preparation I received as an undergraduate in UW's German department has put me in a position to readily engage with and thrive in the active intellectual environment here.   I am having a great time here, and am well into my second semester. I've taken various… Read more

From the Incoming Chair

Dear Alumns and Friends of Germanics,

Summertime and the livin’ is easy, says Porgy and Bess, and I hope you are having a very pleasant summer so far. As the incoming chair of Germanics, I would like to take this opportunity to thank Sabine Wilke for her extraordinary leadership and vision for the past thirteen years. Her zest and skill in directing the program are hard to match, her passion and energy have always seemed boundless to me. She has fostered innovative teaching practices and established productive collaborations of all sorts, and we admire her as one of the leading scholars in the interdisciplinary field of the Environmental Humanities today. While Sabine is enjoying her well-deserved time away from departmental tasks, I am starting my term as chair with an inspiring role model to emulate and some very large shoes to fill. What makes the daunting task ahead seem not quite as daunting, alas, is my accomplished team of colleagues and staff here at the UW along with a group of very talented students and a supportive community of alumni and friends. And we are pleased to welcome Dr. Kye Terrasi from UCLA who will join the Germanics faculty as a full-time lecturer in the fall. Dr. Terrasi is a specialist in Viennese modernism and art and an experienced language teacher as well. To my esteemed colleague Sabine Wilke I offer our sincere thanks for sustaining UW Germanics as an exceptionally strong and viable program during her tenure as chair. Thanks to her we are in great shape, and we move confidently into the future, with the goal of fostering excellence in our students and teaching them to become thoughtful citizens of the 21st century’s globalized world.

Best regards,

Brigitte Prutti


Brigitte Prutti, aiming high 2014

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