News

The Department of Germanic and Slavic Studies is hosting a series of lectures to celebrate the Diefenbaker Memorial Chair of German Literary Studies, an endowed research and public engagement professorship at the University of Waterloo. Leading scholars will be demonstrating the breadth and range of German studies today.

Three lectures will be taking place in March and April:

• Thursday, March 5, 2026 - Priscilla Layne (University of North Caroline at Chapel HIll): Swiss Postcolonial Literature? Reading Martin Dean's Meine Väter (2003) Through Trauma, Mutism, and Third Space
• Thursday, March 26, 2026 - Hannah Eldridge (University of Wisconsin-Madison): The (Germanophone) Poem and the (Connected) World
• Monday, April 6, 2026 - Anjeana Hans (Wellesley College): From Vienna to Hollywood: Independent Films, Exile, and the Shaping of Hollywood Genre

This series is being held in conjunction with the Waterloo Centre for German Studies. For more information on the lectures, please visit The Diefenbaker Lectures website.

The Waterloo Centre for German Studies (WCGS) is pleased to announce the shortlist for its annual Book Prize.  

In response to concerns about the coronavirus, the University of Waterloo is cancelling all non-essential events, and the Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI) is cancelling all bookings of its facilities. The Grimm Lecture was scheduled to be held in the CIGI Auditorium on Thursday, 19 March 2020, and must now be cancelled.

The winner of the inaugural WCGS Book Prize is Alice Weinreb of Loyola University for her book Modern Hungers: Food and Power in Twentieth-Century Germany, published by Oxford University Press.

On Tuesday, November 28th, WCGS Director James Skidmore gave a talk on the history of Christmas traditions in German-speaking Europe. The event was connected with Kitchener's Christkindl Market, which opens next week, on Thursday, December 7th.

Alice Kuzniar, University Research Chair and Professor of German and English, will be awarded the Hans-Walz Research Prize at a champagne reception on 1 December at the Robert Bosch Haus in Stuttgart for her work on the history of homeopathy.  

Alice Kuzniar's new book, The Birth of Homeopathy out of the Spirit of Romanticism, has just been published by the University of Toronto Press.

Whether they arrived in the 1950s on a ship or a few years ago on a passenger plane, German immigrants to Waterloo Region still hold many untold stories in their families that risk being lost if they are not recorded. The Waterloo Centre for German Studies is looking for people of German descent—or their children—who would like to talk about their years in German-speaking Europe, their arrival in Canada during the 1950s, 1960s or later, and their lives in Waterloo Region.