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 Department of Germanic & Slavic Studies is planning on offering RUSS 102 - Elementary Russian 2 in Winter 2026 depending on student interest. 

If you are interested in continuing learning Russian and would like to take RUSS 102 in Winter 2026, please email the department's Undergraduate Office (gssugrad@uwaterloo.ca) as soon as possible to let us know. Sufficient student enrolment is required to offer the course.

Pre-requisite: RUSS 101 or instructor permission.

 

Photo credit:
By A.Savin - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0

DAAD – German Academic Exchange Service invites students and faculty from German language and/or culture programs to join them for an online information session about scholarship and grant programs of relevance to German language learners and those students whose research includes aspects of  German culture, politics, economics or society.

Thursday, October 2, 2025, from 2 to 3pm EDT (11am to noon PDT)

To join the DAAD for this webinar, please register here.

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

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

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.

We are pleased to announce this month’s publication of Ann Marie Rasmussen’s book Medieval Badges: Their Wearers and Their Worlds (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021). Interdisciplinary in approach, and illustrated with more than 115 color and black-and-white images, Medieval Badges: Their Wearers and Their Worlds introduces badges in all their variety and uses.

DAAD - German Academic Exchange Service will present a series of webinars on their student funding programs for study, research and internship opportunities in Germany at noon EST daily from October 4 - 6, 2021.

DAAD has programs for students in all fields of study and at all stages, from Bachelor to PhD, even for recent postdocs.

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.

The GSS department is currently having a visitor from Mannheim: Alexandra Gubina, Ph.D. student from the University of Mannheim, who also works at the Pragmatics department at the Leibniz-Institute for the German Language (IDS). Alex is staying with the GSS department until the mid of April to work on her dissertation with one of her supervisors, Prof.