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.

We proudly present to you the Winter 2023 Golden Boar Awards.

Waterloo Centre for German Studies announces 2023-2024 travel awards

Thinking of going on the Canadian Summer School in Germany Program?
Read this report by Hannah A. Uitvlugt-Rafuse (Frau Hannah) - Honours BA German, APPLS Minor

MURINA is a feminist coming-of-age story set on the Croatian coast.

Germanic & Slavic Studies is offering the following courses in the Spring 2022 term (May to August 2022):

German:
GER 101 online: Elementary German 1 
GER 102 online: Elementary German 2

Dutch:
DUTCH 101 online: Elementary Dutch 1
DUTCH 102 online: Elementary Dutch 2

Russian:
RUSS 101 on-campus: Elementary Russian 1
Tuesdays & Thursdays 4:00pm to 5:20pm

And the Boar Award goes to ...

We proudly present to you the Fall 2021 Golden Boar Awards!

The Award Ceremony will take place on December 7, 2021, 5-7 pm, EST on Zoom.

It's time for our annual Germanic and Slavic Studies Conference!

For the 15th time, the Germanic and Slavic Studies department is hosting the GSS conference. So mark the date: Monday, December 9, 2019, because you don't want to miss this. 

Zina Gimpelevich's book The Portrayal of Jews in Modern Biełarusian Literature, published 2018, has won the Canadian Association of Slavists/Taylor & Francis Book Prize. Congratulations!

Professor Alice Kuzniar received a SSHRC Insight Grant for her research about the influence of the writings and practice of the renowned homeopath Clemens von Bönninghausen on the poetry of Germany's foremost female writer, Annette von Droste-Hülshoff. For this, she asks the question: How can one meaningfully bring together the very different fields of medicine and literature? Professor Kuzniar says that this grant allows her to pursue this line of research and form a team of medical historians and literary scholars.

Read the summary of her proposal below: