This weekend, Dr. Sarah Koellner moderated and presented at the annual conference of the Northeastern Modern Language Association at the panel “Skandal! Artistic Scandals around the Turn of the Century.” Her paper: “”#Babykatzengate: On Stefanie Sargnagel and the Dramaturgy of a Media Scandal”

This semester, Professor Stephen Della Lana’s GRMN 390-01 Business Translation course is linking up with CofC French and German alumna and professional translator Kristen Gehrman’s English Text Editing Course at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam. Professor Gehrman’s students will work in tandem with Professor Della Lana’s and Professor Gehrman will also videoconference in to GRMN 390-01 to discuss careers in translations with our students! With the completion of the Global Education Initiative’s International Lab on the 4th floor of JC Long this month, Professor DL’s students will be able to communicate simultaneously with their tandem partners at four different work stations. Exciting times for global connection possibilities here at CofC!

Congratulations to Dr. Irina Erman on her new article in the top tier Russian Studies journal The Russian Review, Nation and Vampiric Narration in Aleksey Tolstoy’s “The Family of the Vourdalak”! The article is accessible online here

Dr. Erman’s summary of the article: “In this article, I examine the narrative and intertextual complexity of A. K. Tolstoy’s “The Family of the Vourdalak,” while taking note of Tolstoy’s extensive historical references and thus situating Tolstoy’s vampire story in its literary and historical context. I argue that Tolstoy’s emphatic historical references point to the story’s central focus on Russia’s relationship with Western Europe and the concomitant Russian anxieties about national identity and literary imitation. By putting forward the concept of vampiric narration to explain Tolstoy’s mode of undermining his West European narrator’s control, this article demonstrates the way this story comments on, and ultimately subverts, the discourse about imitation and influence that infiltrated Russian letters from West European constructs about its East. Ultimately, Tolstoy’s “The Family of the Vourdalak” offers a meditation on the power of parody and creative appropriation that anticipates important literary‐philosophical concepts that emerge in Russia in the second half of the nineteenth century.”

This week, CofC Russian Studies Program director and Assistant Professor of Russian Dr. Irina Erman is presenting at the annual conference of the Association for Slavic, East European & Eurasian Studies (ASEEES). Her paper, “Communal Vampirism in Alexander Bogdanov’s Red Star,” analyzes the phenomenon of communal vampirism in Alexander Bogdanov’s utopian science fiction novel Red Star (1908) and is being presented on a panel on “Cosmic Dreams and Communal Nightmares: Russian Sci-Fi and Horror.”

Congratulations to Professor of German Dr. Nancy Nenno, whose new article just appeared in print in the fall 2019 special issue “Teaching German in a Global Context” of the premiere German pedagogy journal Die Unterrichtspraxis/Teaching German. The article, entitled “Terms of Engagement: Teaching the African Diaspora in German-Speaking Europe,” explores her popular course on Black Germans and Austrians and makes the case for Black German Studies as a particularly fruitful arena for improving students’ intercultural competence.

Link to the article

On November 11th at 6pm in Arnold Hall (96 Wentworth Street), Ambassador John Kornblum will commemorate the 30-year anniversary of the opening of the Berlin Wall on November 9th, 1989, with a public lecture. One of the leading experts on the transatlantic relationship, John Kornblum was Ambassador to Germany from 1997-2001, had a 35-year career in the foreign service, and played a defining role in many of the events leading up to the end of the cold war. The event is sponsored by the LCWA World Colloquium Series, the German Embassy’s Wunderbar Together 2019 Campus Weeks, and the First Year Experience Program at the College of Charleston.

This weekend, three CofC German Faculty, Dr. Nancy Nenno, Dr. Sarah Koellner, and Dr. Cara Tovey, are attending the annual German Studies conference in Portland Oregon from Oct 4th-6th.

Dr. Nenno is attending as a co-chair for the Black Diaspora Studies Network and will be the commentator for a panel entitled “Imagining and Performing Black Radical Politics: African and European Intersections in Germany.”

Dr. Koellner is presenting a paper entitled “Alles Klar, Herr Kommissar? Counter-Surveillance as a Performative Practice in Ulrich Peltzer’s Teil der Lösung” and moderating the panel “Cities under Siege”

Dr. Tovey is presenting a paper on “Hofmannsthal’s Language of the Body” on the Body Studies Network Panel.

Since June 16th, Dr. Koellner has the opportunity to discuss the contemporary artistic landscape in Germany with key players from the “Literaturbetrieb” as a fellow of the Notre Dame Berlin Seminar. Part of the incredible experience were seminars with the Georg-Büchner-Preis winner Therézia Mora, Suhrkamp’s chief editor Thomas Sparr and film director Volker Schlöndorff (just to name a few). During a short trip to the Literaturinstitut in Leipzig, she was able to meet with one of our students, Denicee Becker, who is participating at the same time in the seminar “Mit Deutsch in die Zukunft” organized by the American Association of Teachers of German.

On April 12th, CofC Professor of German Dr. Nancy Nenno presented a paper entitled “Hearing Voices: Black Austrians and Recent Cinema“ at a research panel on “Migration-Integration in Contemporary Austrian Cinema and Culture.” Now back in Charleston, Dr. Nenno will be introducing black German filmmaker and author Mo Asumang for two events related to her documentary film The Aryans and her book Mo and the Aryans: Alone among racists and neonazis on April 15th and 16th!