2024 Winners of the Cecilia and Late George Piller Graduate Research Award

The Waterloo Centre for German Studies is happy to announce the winners of the 2024 Piller Award.

The winners are:
 

• Amanda Hooper, PhD candidate with the History Department – The “Capital of the Holocaust”: Rethinking the Role of Auschwitz in Holocaust History.This project explores the ways in which Auschwitz, the former Nazi concentration-turned-death-camp, has become the central symbol of the Holocaust. To evaluate the evolving role and centralization of Auschwitz, this research examines major publications, public history sites, and Holocaust survivor testimony. Amanda’s dissertation will assess the weight of Auschwitz in Holocaust history and provide insight to moving beyond the singular camp to a more diverse, complete history of the Holocaust.
• Anna Kuhn, IcGS student with the Department of Germanic and Slavic Studies and the Universitaet Mannheim – A Call for ‘Widerstand’? Identifying strategies of the New Right's Language and Literature Policy. In a time of widespread protests against right-wing extremism, this project exposes the political instrumentalization of German studies. Anna's research will be centred on Verlag Antaios, a right-wing German publishing house. Using discourse analysis and close readings of the material published by Antaios, Anna will examine the New Right’s language and literature policy and their invocation of ‘Widerstand’ (resistance) to uncover how the German far right is justifying resistance against the government. Her evaluation will consider how the term is framed, its inherent ideological perspectives, the literary context in which it is employed, and its intended purpose to uncover unconscious manipulation in German language and literature.

The Cecilia and Late George Piller Graduate Research Awards were established to support excellent graduate students in the Faculty of Arts doing research into any aspect of German Studies.

The winners, chosen from a set of very strong applications, demonstrate the high calibre of the research into German studies being conducted by graduate students in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Waterloo.

Each winner will receive a $4,000 prize to help fund their research.

For further information, please visit the Cecilia and Late George Piller Graduate Research Award website.

For inquiries, please contact the Waterloo Centre for German Studies (wcgs@uwaterloo.ca).