News

Filter by:

Limit to news where the title matches:
Limit to items where the date of the news item:
Date range
Limit to news items where the audience is one or more of:
Friday, February 20, 2026

The Diefenbaker Lectures

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.

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

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

On Thursday, March 19, 2020 Dr. Samantha Rose Hill gave the lecture “Thinking itself is dangerous: Reading Hannah Arendt”. Due to the Coronavirus pandemic, the lecture was held online, and Dr. Hill spoke to hundreds of participants from her home in New York via livestream.

Wednesday, March 18, 2020

Grimm Lecture 2020: Livestream

What can Hannah Arendt’s life and work teach us about our present political moment? Arendt scholar Samantha Rose Hill, Assistant Director of the Hannah Arendt Centre for Politics and Humanities at Bard College, will talk about the renewed interest in Hannah Arendt’s work, and why we should be reading Arendt now to better understand the politics of today.