Lecture

The 2013 Jakob-und-Wilhelm-Grimm Lecture will be given by Harvard film scholar Eric Rentschler. Professor Rentschler, who will also be receiving an honorary doctorate from the University of Waterloo for his leading scholarship in film studies, will be speaking on the film The Lives of Others / Das Leben der Anderen, winner of the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film in 2007.

Thursday, April 20, 2017 1:00 pm - 1:00 pm EDT (GMT -04:00)

Deutsch im kolonialen Kontext (1885-1914)

Von ca. 1885 bis 1914 standen Gebiete in Afrika und dem pazifischen Raum unter deutscher Kolonialherrschaft. Der Vortrag gibt einen Überblick über die deutsche koloniale Sprachenpolitik und die Verbreitung und Rolle der deutschen Sprache im pazifischen Raum, u.a. in Schule und Verwaltung. Aus linguistischer Perspektive werden unterschiedliche Auswirkungen des daraus resultierenden Sprachkontakts dargestellt, wie z.B. lexikalische Sprachkontaktphänomene (Lehnwörter) und die Entstehung einer deutschbasierten Pidgin- und Kreolsprache.

Friday, March 31, 2017 9:30 am - 9:30 am EDT (GMT -04:00)

Narrated Inscriptions in Medieval Literature

This talk grows out of the University of Heidelberg Collaborative Research Centre 933 (CRC 933), in which faculty-led research groups from different disciplines examine script-bearing artefacts such as pillars, steles, portals, tombstones, potsherds, amulets, scrolls, papyri, and parchment codices in order to examine the spec

Friday, May 5, 2017 4:00 pm - 4:00 pm EDT (GMT -04:00)

Data-Driven Learning: Can and Should Language Learners Become Corpus Linguists?

ALERT: DUE TO FLIGHT CANCELLATION, THIS TALK HAS BEEN CANCELLED. IF YOU WERE HOPING TO COME, YOU CAN READ UP ON NINA VYATKINA'S RESEARCH ONLINE. WE KNOW; IT'S NOT THE SAME THING.

Tuesday, April 4, 2017 7:00 pm - 7:00 pm EDT (GMT -04:00)

Luther Year 2017: Did Luther Invent High German?

In 1517, Martin Luther published the Ninety-Five Theses, and 2017, "The Luther Year," celebrates the 500th anniversary of this beginning of the Reformation. Luther’s German translation of the Bible has remained influential to this day; his hymns are still sung; and many still use his proverbs. But does all this make him the inventor of High German?

Monday, December 5, 2016 5:30 pm - 5:30 pm EST (GMT -05:00)

Animal Studies and the Voice of the Other

Ron Broglio will trace back to the 18th-century sensibility movement contemporary post-humanist ideas of animals having a voice. In his talk, he will pursue what animal studies can push against in terms of the animal “rights” movement.

His publications include:

Monday, February 6, 2017 7:00 pm - 7:00 pm EST (GMT -05:00)

Grimm Lecture 2017 - Timothy Snyder : The Holocaust as History and Warning

Timothy Snyder, author of the widely successful book Black Earth, believes we have misunderstood the Holocaust and the essential lessons it should have taught us. If the Holocaust was indeed, as Snyder’s carefully constructed argument will demonstrate, a result of ecological panic and state destruction, then our misunderstanding of it has endangered our own future. The world of the early twenty-first century resembles the world of the early twentieth more than we realize—and some of our own sensibilities are closer to those of Europeans of the 1930s than we might like to think.

Election battles were fought ferociously in pre-World War One Germany, when most middle-class Germans still opposed formal democracy. Anti-democrats deployed many exclusionary strategies that flew in the face of electoral fairness.

We are seeing a push towards offering more courses online because they can provide students with new forms of social and learning interaction, widen their access to education, and offer an indi­vidualized learning experience in large classes.