Annual Reports

The Waterloo Centre for German Studies publishes an annual report of its activities. Here is the report for 2020-2021; reports for previous years follow it.

Annual Report 2020-2021

Despite the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, the Waterloo Centre for German Studies remains active in the fields of scholarly inquiry and student support.

The University of Waterloo campus has been more or less closed since March, 2020, but the work of WCGS has continued. One positive outcome of the pivot to online working has been the increase in webinars and presentations available to anyone with a computer or smartphone. Through our WCGS social media accounts, website, and newsletter, we’ve been promoting lectures and events put on by universities and institutes around the world, and we’ve noticed a marked increase in our communications traffic. With the help of Alice Kuzniar from the University of Waterloo, we mounted our own online series of “works in progress” featuring Ontario colleagues Ann Marie Rasmussen, Melanie Jackson, Paola Mayer, Ruediger Mueller, Myrto Provida, and James Skidmore. Since the COVID situation remains unsettled in Ontario, we expect to organize more online events for the foreseeable future.

WCGS BOOK PRIZE

One of our most important contributions to research dissemination is our annual book prize, now in its third year. The winner for books published in 2019 was Matthew H. Birkhold for his wonderful Characters before Copyright: The Rise and Regulation of Fan Fiction in Eighteenth-Century Germany, an engrossing study of the impact of fan fiction on the development of copyright. We hope to have Matthew give an online presentation about his work in Fall 2021.

For books published in 2019, we had 26 nominations and 7 books were shortlisted.

DIVERSITY AND INCLUSION GRANTS

In response to the increased concern about issues of diversity and inclusion in our institutions, WCGS launched its Diversity and Inclusion Grants program to assist colleagues across the country as they work to make German studies more inclusive and reflective of our student populations. Five grants were awarded to support projects at universities in British Columbia, Ontario, Nova Scotia, and Newfoundland and Labrador. Project descriptions can be found on the WCGS website, and during the year we’ll be providing updates as the projects come to fruition.

EXPENDITURES

Expenditures for the WCGS broke down as follows:

• Total expenditures: $41,300
• 66% administration (salaries, publicity, and office expenses)
• 15% internships
• 12% scholarships
• 7% WCGS Book Prize

STORK AWARDS IN GERMAN STUDIES

Even though study abroad programs have been on hiatus, our Stork Awards in German Studies continue to support students in their acquisition of German. The Canadian Summer School in Germany, directed byJohn Plews at St. Mary’s University, usually takes students to Kassel for two months every summer. This year they’ve mounted an innovative virtual immersion program, and WCGS was very happy to be able to cover the $500 program fee for 10 of the students.

We are grateful to everyone who supports and takes an interest in the activities of the Waterloo Centre for German Studies.

Stay safe and stay in touch!

James M. Skidmore

A PDF version of the WCGS Annual Report 2020-2021 is available here.

The Waterloo Centre for German Studies has just completed another busy year of activities, and I’d like to take a moment to bring you up to date on them.

Our lives and routines have been disrupted by the coronavirus pandemic, and I first want to express my sincere hope that you are well and managing as best you can under these strange and unusual circumstances. The University of Waterloo campus closed in the middle of March, and since then both Misty Matthews-Roper, the WCGS Administrative Assistant, and I have been working from home – Misty in Dundas with her two cats, Noam Chompsky and Flour, and I in Uptown Waterloo with my two imaginary cats, Goethe and Schiller.

The University shut down operations the very week we were to hold our annual Grimm Lecture, the flagship event at the Centre. Ticket reservations were very strong, and we were at capacity: over 250 people had registered to hear Dr. Samantha Rose Hill, the Assistant Director of the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College, present a lecture entitled Thinking Itself Is Dangerous: Reading Hannah Arendt Now. We had just enough lead time to switch gears and arrange for Samantha to livestream her lecture from the safety of her home in New York.

At the time Misty and I were a bit overwhelmed by the logistics involved, but we were lucky enough to have Davian Hart from Sherwood Systems provide the necessary technical assistance. In the end, our perseverance paid off: over 400 people tuned in at some point during the livestream, and the YouTube video of the event has had hundreds of views.

Many of those who attended got in touch after the event to express their gratitude to WCGS for broadcasting such an engaging and thought-provoking lecture at a time when everything seemed to be falling apart.

The Grimm Lecture concluded a very strong year of lectures at WCGS. We connected with the Stratford Festival where German-Canadian director and dramaturg Dr. Birgit Schreyer-Duarte was mounting a new production of Lessing’s Nathan the Wise. Birgit spoke to an audience of drama and German students, as well as profs and community members, in September about how she interpreted this classic of German theatre for a 21st-century audience. Earlier in the summer Professor Andrea Speltz from the University of Waterloo gave a talk at Stratford about the play, and we used that as an occasion to provide WCGS members with a very reasonable “lecture, dinner, and a show” package. Members who attended let us know how much they enjoyed the play, Andrea’s lecture, and conversations during the light meal.

Other lectures this past year highlighted the strength of German studies research at the University Waterloo. Professor James Diamond, Joseph and Wolf Lebovic Chair of Jewish Studies at the University of Waterloo,

spoke on the sermons of Rabbi Kalonymous Kalman Shapira in the Warsaw Ghetto during the German occupation of Poland during World War Two, and Professor Lynne Taylor from the Department of history gave a lecture on the challenges faced by unaccompanied children in Germany in the aftermath of the war. We were also fortunate to have some guests from other institutions share their ideas with us, most notably Dr. Silke Reineke of the Leibniz Institute for the German Language who spoke on corpora (depositories of recordings and transcripts) of spoken German, and Dr. Elizabeth Nijdam from the University of British Columbia, an expert on German comics.

The Centre was very pleased to assist the Goethe-Institut, the language departments at the University of Waterloo, and Waterloo International in their programming for Career Booster Day during International Education Week. The Centre provided half of the funding to bring in the keynote speaker, filmmaker and writer Alexandre Trudeau, who addressed an audience of 300 high school and university students about the ways in which being multilingual have made his life richer and more meaningful.

We also had a pleasant surprise and huge disappointment all rolled into one this year. In a normal year, thanks to the generous donations of the Stork Family and Marga Weigel, we’re able to offer $500-1,000 scholarships annually to approximately  40  students participating in Canadian-organized summer study abroad programs in Germany. But this was not a normal year. We were surprised by the record number of applications  – 81 students from 21 different Canadian universities participating in 11 different programs approached us for funding. The disappointment was - you guessed it - that all the programs had to be canceled due to the pandemic. There was nothing to be done about it, but we were nevertheless very sad to see such a large number of university students denied the opportunity of experiencing Germany first-hand.

Likewise, our last bit of news was affected by the pandemic as well. The WCGS Book Prize this year went to Michael O’Sullivan, a professor of history at Marist College, New York, for his book Disruptive Power: Catholic Women, Miracles, and Politics in Modern Germany, 1918-1965, an absorbing study of the Catholic mystic Therese Neumann of Konnersreuth and the circle of theologians, politicians, journalists and others who followed her. We had planned to make the official presentation of the award at the annual convention of the Canadian Association of University Teachers of German in May, 2020, but that event, like so many others, had to be cancelled. This was the second time we’ve awarded the WCGS Book Prize, and we think it is becoming an important feature on the German studies landscape in North America.

Let me close by reminding you that we are always happy to hear from you. You can connect with us by Facebook, Twitter, and email – our various handles and addresses are below. We appreciate very much your support and interest.

Sincerely,

James M. Skidmore, Director

Twitter - @uWaterlooWCGS
Facebook - @WaterlooCentreForGermanStudies
Email - wcgs@uwaterloo.ca

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It is once again my pleasure to update you on the activities of the Waterloo Centre for German Studies at the University of Waterloo. The Centre exists to support research into the society and culture of the German-speaking world, to help students pursue studies in Europe, and to organize lectures and other cultural programming in the Waterloo Region.

None of the work at the Waterloo Centre for German Studies would be possible without the contributions of our staff and executive committee. Misty Matthews-Roper, WCGS Administrative Assistant, excellently manages all of our activities and is to be commended for her commitment to WCGS and all it does. Executive Committee members – Ana Ferrer, Anne Marie Rasmussen, Michael Boehringer, and Gary Bruce – provide advice and input on our affairs. My job as Director is considerably easier thanks to the assistance of Misty, Ana, Anne Marie, Michael, and Gary, and I thank them for that.

Every five years all research institutes at the University of Waterloo are reviewed by the Senate and Graduate Research Council, a committee that then makes a recommendation to the University Senate regarding the institute’s status as an official university research institute. Our review was held this year, and you can find the full report on our website. I’m very happy to report that WCGS received unanimous approval for a renewal of its status, and we were commended on our many accomplishments over the past five years. Many of you contributed to the report by participating in a survey we conducted, and your comments showed that WCGS has earned a reputation for providing stimulating intellectual and cultural programming.

One of the new initiatives we launched this year was the WCGS Book Prize. Any author who has published their first work on any topic in German studies in English (or in French if published in Quebec) is eligible. A world-class jury consisting of Karin Bauer (McGill University), Ann Marie Rasmussen (University of Waterloo), Ritchie Robertson (University of Oxford), and Karina Urbach (Institute of Advanced Study, Princeton), with me assisting as Jury Chair, read submissions from literary studies, history, music studies, anthropology, philosophy, and other fields. The work being done by new scholars in German studies is both wide-ranging and impressive, and while only one book could be chosen as winner many of the books submitted met the award’s criteria for originality, scholarly relevance, and contributions to public-oriented scholarship. But the one that stood out was Alice Weinreb’s Modern Hungers: Food and Power in Twentieth-Century Germany. Prof. Weinreb, who teaches at Loyola University in Chicago, examines how hunger has been a central motivating force in German politics throughout the 20th century.  By focusing on hunger’s role in German society, Prof. Weinreb demonstrates “the fluid relationship between state power and food provisioning.” If governments control the food supply, they can also control the populaces they govern, and Prof. Weinreb uses Germany as a case study to illustrate this important point. In March 2019, Prof. Weinreb came to Waterloo to give a lecture on the book and collect her $2,000 prize.

We held other lectures this year, as we always do. The annual Grimm Lecture saw 150+ people come to the Balsillie School for International Affairs in uptown Waterloo to hear a lecture marking the 200th anniversary of the birth of Karl Marx. Leading Marx biographer Gareth Stedman Jones discussed Marx’s views on just how long capitalism might continue to dominate western economic practice in light of the changes he and others fought for during the 19th century. Indigenous playwright and documentarian Drew Hayden Taylor came to campus to present his CBC documentary Searching for Winnetou, a film that examines the German fascination with the old west and First Nations culture. With the assistance of the Goethe-Institut, Toronto, we were able to invite best-selling German author Benedict Wells to give a reading from the English translation of his novel Vom Ende der Einsamkeit (The End of Loneliness), a reading that was of particular interest to members of the active WCGS Reading Group (spearheaded by WCGS member Lori Straus). Gary Bruce from UW’s History department presented a lecture based on his recently published history of the Berlin zoo.

WCGS supports research in other ways. Centre member Professor Alice Kuzniar has been the driving force behind an informal research group into poetics and nature in German cultural history, especially the 18th and 19th centuries. In April, along with Fraser Easton and John Savarese from the Department of English Language and Literature, Prof. Kuzniar organized an interdisciplinary symposium entitled The Nature of Experiment: Intelligence, Life, and the Human. WCGS provided logistical support as well as funding, as did the Dean of Arts and the departments of English Language and Literature and Philosophy. The symposium attracted speakers and attendees from across campus and featured a keynote address by CalTech professor Jocelyn Holland on dimensionality and virtuality in the history of thought experiments.

WCGS also continues to provide excellent support for students to travel to and study in German-speaking Europe. Long-time WCGS supporter Marga Weigel has provided money to launch two new travel scholarship programs at the University of Waterloo. One is based in Engineering and is managed by that faculty, but the other is in the Faculty of Arts and managed by WCGS. These Awards - $1,000 per student,

with up to five being awarded annually in each program) – are a testament to her long-held belief that Canadian students need exposure to German-speaking society and economies in order to be successful in their chosen careers. These scholarships complement the long-standing Stork Awards in German Studies. This year we’ve been able to assist over 30 students from across Canada attend summer programs in Germany with awards ranging between $500 and $1,000. These are competitive scholarships, and I’m grateful to Professors Barbara Schmenk and Paul Malone for helping me select the recipients from among the many applicants. The number of applications far exceeds the amount of money we have available for these awards, and while that is somewhat frustrating – we want everyone to learn German! – it is also a sign that German studies is of interest to students throughout Canada, and that the Waterloo Centre for German Studies can play a key role in fostering this interest.

Let me close by reminding you that you can connect with the Centre via Facebook, Twitter (@uWaterlooWCGS), or our website (www.wcgs.ca) where you can also sign up for our mailing list. And please feel free to get in touch with questions or comments by emailing us at wcgs@uwaterloo.ca. We very much appreciate your support and interest.

Written by James Skidmore

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The Centre has had another splendid year facilitating research into the society and culture of the German-speaking world, helping students (like those from the Université du Québec above) spend time in Europe, and organizing events and cultural programming for the Waterloo Region. The following will outline some of the highlights from the past year and some of the upcoming plans.

The past year was marked by a change in administrative staff. Lori Straus, who had been with the Centre since 2013, left to devote herself to some of her own projects and to pursue a PhD. Luckily, Lori’s replacement is just as capable and efficient. Misty Matthews-Roper joined the Centre in January 2018 and has been making her mark with her professionalism and organizational skills.

Which is good, because there is a lot to organize! Surveying the Centre's activities from 2012 to 2017 yielded impressive results (see pie chart breakdown). In a period of a little over five years, the Centre has sponsored over 90 separate activities. These range from large-scale research initiatives such as organizing colloquia to much smaller affairs such as providing support to classes to attend German-themed film or stage presentations. What’s most impressive is that so many of the Centre’s activities, being open to anyone, serve to bring the general public into contact with the scholarly exploration of German-language culture and society.

This past year was no exception in that regard. In cooperation with the Austrian Cultural Forum and Conrad Grebel University College, the Centre helped organize the standing-room only recital of Anna Magdalena Kokits, a young Austrian pianist who toured Canada as part of Government of Austria’s celebration of Canada’s 150th birthday. University of Waterloo President Feridun Hamdullahpur, Conrad Grebel leaders Jim Pankratz and Marlene Epp, and Austrian Cultural Forum Director Bernhard Faustenhammer were all in attendance. The evening of the recital was also the opening of the CALLIOPE Austria - Women in Society, Culture and the Sciences.

The Centre contributed to the cost of mounting that touring exhibition, and it was wonderful to see so many people taking it in. The Centre also started cooperating with the embassies of Switzerland, Germany, and Austria to bring German-language films to the Princess Cinema in Waterloo each May.

The Centre was also very happy to support a two-day colloquium and workshop organized by Andrea Speltz and Barbara Schmenk. “The Role of the Imagination in German Educational Thought” attracted some 40 people who spent two days thinking about how the imagination can be educated in the pursuit of social justice. Other events this past year included a workshop organized by Alice Kuzniar on the Romantic poet Novalis that featured York professor Joan Steigerwald, and the Centre hosted a reading at the Open Sesame Shop in Kitchener with Carl Skoggard introducing his new translation of Siegfried Kracauer’s novel Georg. The sponsorship of research can take other forms as well: in 2017 editors Michael Boehringer, Belinda Kleinhans, and Allison Cattell published a volume of essays, Belief Systems in Austrian Literature, Thought and Culture, that was subsidized by the centre, and scholars Emma Betz, Alice Kuzniar, and Angelica Fenner received grants to support their research endeavours.

Thanks to a surplus in our Fred and Ruth Stork German Study Awards fund, the Centre was able to award more travel scholarships than usual. A little advertising was all it took to attract applications from across the country. Many Canadian universities offer excellent study abroad opportunities in German-speaking Europe, and the Centre is very happy to support these expensive undertakings with modest but extremely helpful scholarships. 35 students from across Canada – including 10 from the University of Waterloo – received support to attend programs in Kassel, Bamberg, Mannheim, and Berlin. The Centre also continues to manage the Cecilia and Late George Piller Graduate Research Award, available to excellent UW students researching any aspect of the German-speaking world (see graphic of awarded funds).
 

The upcoming year promises to be a very good one for the Centre. The 2018 Grimm Lecture, the flagship lecture series of the Waterloo Centre for German Studies, will be held on Thursday, September 20th, 2018, at 7pm at the Balsillie School of International Affairs in Waterloo. 2018 is the bicentennial of Karl Marx’s birth and, love him or hate him, his impact on human history can’t be ignored. Cambridge professor Gareth Stedman Jones, FBA, well known for his exhaustive 2016 biography of Karl Marx, will be delivering a lecture on whether it’s possible to separate Marx from Marxism. And on Wednesday, October 24th, 2018, at 7pm, also at the Balsillie School, indigenous playwright and filmmaker Drew Hayden Taylor will screen his CBC documentary “Searching for Winnetou” about the continuing German fascination for the romanticized version of the Old West found in Karl May novels and summer western festivals. This will be a great opportunity to consider issues surrounding cultural appropriation in Germany.

Personal Note from the Director: Since taking on the directorship of the Centre a year ago, I have been reviewing past activities and, along with the Centre’s Executive Committee, thinking about where the Centre needs to be focusing its energies and resources. The University of Waterloo is incredibly fortunate to have an institute like the Waterloo Centre for German Studies; not many research institutes have the opportunity or ability to connect with a larger public the way we are able to do. It’s very important that the Centre continue to maintain a presence in both the scholarly and public realms in order to help bridge the gap that often divides the two, and we are exploring ways of doing just that. One new initiative that is already underway is the WCGS Book Prize. This prize has been established to recognize books published in 2017 that improve our understanding of any aspect of German-speaking society. One of the award’s criteria is the book’s potential to contribute to broader public discourses. In next year’s annual report, I’ll be able to tell you about the winning book.

Written by James Skidmore

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The Centre continued to move forward with its mandate of facilitating research into all aspects of the society and culture of the German-speaking world, enabling student travel to Europe, and providing Waterloo Region with opportunities to engage with German culture through public events.

A note of introduction: James Skidmore is the new Director of the Centre, having taken over the reins from Mat Schulze on July 1st of this year. Mat has left Waterloo to take up a position at San Diego State University. James has been at the University since 2000 in the Department of German and Slavic Studies, where he also served a term as department chair. He earned his PhD in German literary studies at Princeton University, and his research and teaching centre on contemporary German-language literature and film.

This past year, thanks to some scheduling conflicts, the Centre managed to hold not one but two Grimm Lectures, the Centre's flagship public event. In October 2016, Prof. James Retallack of the University of Toronto gave a presentation on a little-known but fascinating chapter of German electoral history entitled “Democracy in Disappearing Ink: The Politics of Exclusion in Germany before Hitler.” In his lecture Retallack explained the strategies of anti-democrats in the late 19th century to undermine electoral fairness.

In February 2017, Yale scholar and best-selling author Timothy Snyder (right) attracted a capacity crowd to the Theatre of the Arts on campus for his lecture “The Holocaust as History and Warning.” Snyder’s work on the European conflicts of the 1930s and 1940s has earned him an international following. In his talk he stressed that one major reason the Holocaust occurred was that those institutions that could have prevented the rise of disorder were too weak to do so, a fact Snyder felt should not be lost in the current political climate. This lecture was included in the University’s “60 Years of Innovation” anniversary programming.

2017 may mark the 60th anniversary of the University of Waterloo and the 150th anniversary of Canadian confederation, but 2016 was the 100th anniversary of Berlin, Ontario changing its name to Kitchener. To commemorate this important moment in local history, the Centre sponsored two events: in September 2016 a packed house at the Kitchener Public Library Theatre listened to a panel moderated by former Kitchener mayor Carl Zehr discuss the lead-up to and ramifications of the name change on the German-Canadian community. The Centre also contributed its expertise to the Waterloo Region Museum’s fall exhibition “City on Edge” that told the story of how and why the City of Berlin changed its name.

These events, and many others – for example author readings and presentations by visiting scholars – continue to be well attended. Happily, Centre audiences are still a mixture of students, faculty members, and the general public, and future programming will aim to obtain this kind of interaction between scholars and interested residents.

The Centre also administers scholarships for graduate and undergraduate students; this past year over $20,000 was distributed to worthy recipients. Many of these scholarships come from the Fred and Ruth Stork awards, and are intended to facilitate student travel to educational opportunities in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. One of these recipients, Steven Xu in Computer Science, accompanied a group that James led (along with Prof. Joan Coutu of Fine Arts) on a 10-day trip to Berlin. Here’s an excerpt from Steven’s report on his experience:

I could tell my competency in the German language has improved even though it was only 10 days. I started conversations with people in German as much as I could, and I really enjoyed the surprising and impressed look they gave me. Just by speaking and listening German every day, I felt that it took me less time to organize a sentence in my head before I could say it out, and also I learned a lot of important, everyday vocabularies that weren't in my textbooks. I wouldn't be able to improve my German this significantly if I didn't physically go to Germany.

That, in a nutshell, explains why travel awards are so important.

The members of the Centre have been busy with a variety of research projects that have received Centre support. Mat Schulze and his team are putting the finishing touches on the book project Germans of Waterloo Region, an anthology of articles based on interviews with local German-Canadians that was supported in part by a grant from local citizens. Centre Member Alice Kuzniar, who was recently named a University of Waterloo Research Professor, one of only two faculty members in Arts so honoured, has just published a book on the roots of homeopathy in 19th-century German Romantic Thought with the University of Toronto Press. (Prof. Kuzniar gave the 2015 Grimm Lecture on this topic.) The Centre’s Administrative Assistant Lori Straus has organized a German fiction reading group, a nice addition to the Centre’s outreach activities; the picture above shows book club members with visiting German author Christopher Kloeble (third from right).

Written by James Skidmore

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The 13th year of the WCGS has been an eventful and successful one and we've been able to further our reach in the areas covered by our mandate. Below you’ll find a summary of our activities for 2015-2016.  

German Studies Research

The WCGS held its annual German Studies Forum (GSF) in December. The GSF allows researchers to network, create research groups, and update their peers on the progress of their various projects. The University of Toronto’s Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures co-hosted the event.

Through the year, we have also supported many research initiatives, including colloquia, conferences, and workshops. In several cases, organizers required the WCGS’s support to apply for and then receive additional support from other funding sources. In addition, two books—one on the history of the German Democratic Republic and one on contemporary Austria—are being edited by Centre members for the WCGS Book Series.

Educational and Cultural Activities

We held several events this year, including film screenings, author readings, and lectures. By far our most successful was the 2015 Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm Lecture, given by UWaterloo professor Dr. Alice Kuzniar. titled "The Birth of Homeopathy out of the Spirit of 1800: Medicine as Cultural History." There was standing room only in the lecture hall.

Other Events from this year:

• Lectures covered all matter of subjects this year. A sample: In "Digging up the Doll," Dr. Linda Wharley considered her mother's recollections as a child refugee in 1945. Moving to more modern times, Dr. Jonathon Reinhardt from the University of Arizona gave a lecture on digital gaming and language learning. Centre Director Mat Schulze presented research that examined how students transfer their learning from on-line to on-campus courses.
• The WCGS research group on Poetics and Nature circa 1800 held two seminars: "Nature and Education circa 1800," and "Spinoza, Goethe, Deleuze: All is Leaf (or Rhizome - Take Your Pick). Both offered a day of short presentations and discussions.
• On the artistic side, German artist Marc Bauder gave a presentation on his and his brother's art installation "Lichtgrenze," which was created to commemorate the fall of the Berlin Wall. In the winter semester, two authors visited: Michael Götting, who read from his book Contra Punctus, and Marc Degens, who read excerpts from his novel God's Busted Knee and a few short stories.

Engaging with German-Canadian Heritage

Work on the book for the oral history project is coming along. Tentatively titled The Germans of Waterloo Region, the manuscript was in the second draft stage by the end of the fiscal year. It incorporates all 110 interviews conducted from 2013-2015.

Scholarships

Thanks to the generous donations of local citizens, the Waterloo Centre for German Studies is able to support students in their pursuit of knowledge about all things German. Go to our scholarships page to learn more about these funds and the students they support.

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2014-2015 has been another successful year at the Waterloo Centre for German Studies.  Here's a rundown on some of the year's highlights.

Events

A number of activities commemorated the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.  WCGS Director Mat Schulze gave a lecture about the momentous events of October/November 1989. The Centre also hosted an exhibition on Dictatorship and Democracy that was developed by the Institute of Contemporary History in Munich. In May, 2015 Marc Bauder, a Berlin filmmaker, spoke at the department of Germanic and Slavic Studies conference on his installation of Lichtgrenze.

The Centre supported supported a couple of interesting performing arts projects. Coffee, My Beloved! was a collage of scenes produced and performed by students in an undergraduate course entitled Performance German. Führerbunker was a new work of opera by noted Canadian composer Andrew Ager that received its premiere in Kitchener. The Centre was also able to host the visits of some creative artists working in German and/or Germany. Daniela Wolff (pictured at right) is a local resident who writes German crime novels set in Hannover. Maria Speth is a Berlin-based filmmaker known for her provocative feature films and documentaries featuring the lives of women and youth in modern-day urban Germany. Again this year some prominent scholars presented research talks at the Centre. The annual Grimm Lecture, the Centre's flagship lecture, featured Dennis Mahoney from the University of Vermont speaking on landscapes in the German Romantic tradition. Ann Marie Rasmussen, the new holder of the Diefenbaker Memorial Chair in German Literary Studies, gave her inaugural lecture on medieval misogyny. Bryan Smith from Arizona State University lectured on what learners do when they learn a language.

Scholarships

Thanks to the generous donations of local citizens, the Waterloo Centre for German Studies is able to support students in their pursuit of knowledge about all things German. Go to our scholarships page to learn more about these funds and the students they support.

Other news

The Centre's finances remain in excellent shape. Revenue from the endowment continues to exceed Centre expenses. The WCGS is therefore able to support a number of projects and research initiatives.  Centre administrative assistant Lori Straus has been making a variety of improvements to the Centre's online presence. The website has been adapted to the University of Waterloo's new content management system, and this has allowed for a number of improvements in the presentation of the Centre's activities. Lori is also establishing the Centre's presence on Facebook and Twitter; more information about these will be available in fall 2015. The university has established a new policy on Research Centres and Institutes. The Centre's Executive Committee taken steps to enact a charter for the Centre that will incorporate the procedures required by the policy into the Centre's governance structures. Centre Director Mat Schulze was on sabbatical in January to June 2015. Centre member James Skidmore filled in for him while he was away.

Oral History Project

Work continued on the Oral History Project, an initiative funded partially by local German-Canadians. Over 100 interviews with German-Canadians have been recorded and transcribed, and an editorial team comprising Centre members Mat Schulze, Grit Liebscher, and Sebastian Siebel-Achenbach are working on a collection of articles that will summarize the many themes emerging from this rich collection of oral history.